June Chocheles Interview – September 26, 2016
WEISS: I'm Helen Weiss for the San Diego Technology Archive housed at the Special Collections at the UC San Diego Geisel Library. I'm interviewing Ms. June Chocheles on September 26, 2016. Ms. Chocheles joined SAIC in 1983. In 2006, she left SAIC as the Vice President of Science and Technology Strategy after several decades with the company, where she held a variety of positions in program management and business development. We are interviewing Ms. Chocheles today at the UC San Diego Geisel Library. Thank you Ms. Chocheles for making time for this oral history interview. We will be walking through your background, education, and then find out about your experiences at SAIC, especially here in the San Diego area. After leaving SAIC, you have remained very active in various aspects of education technology, so we will explore that as well. Tell me about your background before you joined SAIC. Where did you grow up, and what were your childhood interests and hobbies?
CHOCHELES: First of all, thank you for the opportunity to participate in this project. Very exciting for me. I'll tell you a little bit about my background. I actually have a bachelor's and master's degree in history. I do believe that oral histories and historical documents-primary and secondary source materials-are very, very important for people to understand what happened during a particular point in time. A little bit about my background. I grew up on Long Island, New York and I was in a family of a mother, who was in the arts - she was a commercial artist for some point in time - and then my father who worked for an aerospace company in manufacturing. He later got into quality assurance and quality control and worked on the Apollo space program and on major aircraft programs. So technology is very, very much a part of my background. I also grew up in a family where books were very important, and reading, and education. Neither one of my parents attended college; they both went to trade schools, but they were very well read. We had a lot of books in the home. It's very interesting; my parents were do it yourselfers, DIYers. My parents built the house that we lived in, of course with some support from contractors, but they were two city kids that decided that they wanted to move out to the suburbs, and they decided that they were going to build a house. My father wanted to learn how to sail a boat, so he learned how to sail a boat. He wanted to learn how to do celestial navigation, so he learned how to do that. My mother was very interested in growing things, and botany, and plants, and so she had kind of an extensive self-education in that area. She learned and taught herself to do all different types of crafts, and just different artistic projects. For them their philosophy was: if you want to do something, you just learn how to do it. There weren't really a lot of boundaries in terms of you can't do this, you can't do that. The other thing that was very important in our family is that, music was very important. I learned how to play the violin when I was eight years old, and I am still a violinist. I played in a variety of different groups throughout my career. Always had that as a primary hobby. My sister played the flute, and my brother played the saxophone and bassoon. My other sister played the cello and guitar. My father played classical guitar. That was another thing. He wanted to learn how to play classical guitar, so he took lessons, and he practiced, and he did that as an adult. I would say I came from a family of entrepreneurs in their own right in the sense that if they wanted to do something, they just went ahead and did it. It did not take a lot of money then for what we wanted to do, and I think that we were fortunate in that we grew up in a town where there were good resources. Free music lessons in school, which I am an advocate of. I think it is really important. I think that our society needs to rethink the arts in education. There are a lot of good things that come out of having young children learn a musical instrument, learn a second language. I think those things really need to be brought back into the curriculum.
WEISS: What was the name of the town you grew up in?
CHOCHELES: I grew up in a town called Babylon.
WEISS: And then you went onto college for your bachelor's and master's. Where please?
CHOCHELES: Before I get into that, I also wanted to say that I was also very active in the Girl Scouts. I think between the music and the Girl Scouts that's where I really learned leadership abilities or capabilities. Being a musician is very competitive. People don't realize that, but you have to compete for chairs. You have to practice your music. It's discipline, and competition, and achievement. The same thing with Girl Scouts. You had a sash, and I wanted my sash filled with badges, and I achieved the Senior Girl Scout status. Then also when I was a senior in high school, I also became a junior leader to a junior Girl Scout troop. Looking back, very early on I just decided to take on these responsibilities. I don't think it was conscious at the time, but everything was so interesting to me and I always wanted to try. Oh, let me try this, and this looks interesting, and let me see how this goes. This is going back from say, eight years old, fourth grade, until the time I was 17. I think the foundation was laid early on that supported my achievements, both academically and then in terms of my career. The other thing is that in our family all of the kids had summer jobs, or had to work from an early age. I remember starting to work when I was 12 years old. I think I was babysitting. Then when I got a little bit older I had summer jobs. Worked at a local pool, community pool. I was a receptionist in a law office. There were a couple of summers where I worked at Grumman Aerospace. They had a summer program for students. Essentially, I have been working since I was 12 years old, and I think it's a good habit to have, and it is nice to be able to know that you can generate your own money, earn your own money. All those components came to play in how I proceeded forward with my life in general. I graduated in 1973, and I went off to school at State University of New York at Fredonia. I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do. This was back in the early 70s, and I remember going in to see my [high school] guidance counselor. I remember the guidance counselor saying, "You have three choices for a career. You can be a teacher, you can be a nurse, or you can be a secretary." That's what the times were like then. I said, well, I don't know. There was nothing that really jumped out at me. I knew my disposition wasn't well suited to the medical profession. Secretary, I don't know, that didn't thrill me that much. So I said, "Oh, I'll go into education." I still was very much into my music, and so I said, "Well, I think maybe what I'll do is I'll take music as my major, and I will become a music educator." So after about probably one or two semesters I realized that my life as a musician, and even as a music educator, was going to be too narrow for me, because I'm just very interested in a lot of things. So I said, "I think I just need to open the aperture a little bit more. I'm not sure what's there, but let me see what the other options are." After I attended Fredonia for about a year and a half, I decided that it was a little bit too cold near Buffalo, New York for me, so I transferred to SUNY Stony Brook University on Long Island. And when I was there, I continued with taking my credits, and one day I had to declare my major. This was not very scientific, but I added up the classes and I saw where I was, and I thought I could swing it to be a history major. I was incredibly interested in history. It was a big decision. Like I said, not very scientific, but I just started to go down that path. I do want to say that one of the teachers that I had in elementary school, sixth grade history teacher was instrumental in encouraging my interest in history. He was forward thinking. I remember doing a couple of projects. One of them was the history of the Greek playwrights. I was about 12 years old. And my mother helped me, with her arts background, helped me develop a diorama of a stage, and I made these little stick puppets of the Greek playwrights. I actually did this whole little presentation where I was just talking about what their philosophy was, and I was just fascinated. Whether I consciously knew it or not, I was fascinated in how people think, and what their ideas are, and how that influences the society that they are living in. Even though I couldn't really articulate it at the time, I was very curious in trying to just understand how things work.
WEISS: So then you finished up at Stony Brook, and then what happens?
CHOCHELES: Yes. So I finished up at Stony Brook. I actually student taught to get my teaching credentials. And the class that I taught was called Technology in Society. So even though a lot of my career path has been focused on technology, it was more opportunistic, and things just started to fall into place. I do not remember having a choice for that. I remember that I was assigned to a school. I got there. My teacher that I was assigned to was teaching a class in science and technology, The History of Technology, specifically on Long Island. This is in the 70s. This is pre-internet, and there were not a lot of primary source materials around. When you taught, you taught with secondary source materials. You primarily taught with textbooks, maybe there were some special books in the class, books that were written by other people that maybe relied on primary source material reviewing, and then they did compilations to create these books and documents. I remember at that time I became interested in use of primary source materials to teach history, because there are some biases here when you are looking at textbooks, for example. I got into encouraging students to read primary source materials, and then this was a way that they could actually do their own analysis, start to see how there was all these different variables that came into play. This was when I was a senior in college. I remember seeing the lightbulb go off in some of these kids, because they're like, "Oh, history is really boring." And I was like, "No, history might be boring if you're reading dates and things in a textbook, but history is not boring at all." When they started to dive in, it was very exciting to me. I knew that I had to get my master's degree to get my permanent teaching certification. I'm the type of person who likes to just power through. And I was encouraged by my academic advisor to apply to graduate school. I applied and I got into Stony Brook in the graduate program in History, and I had a choice to go on past my master's for a Ph.D., but after I was there I just realized that the Ph.D. was not the right fit for me, and I graduated with my master's. This was during the recession in the late 70s, and I was not able to find a job. It's really interesting when I hear young kids today talk about the challenges of finding a job, and that it's very, very difficult. I believe that every generation has had their challenges looking for a job, and I think that you just have to be very creative and you have to be extremely persistent, and you have to use your network. Now you have the internet, you have all these different systems where you can put your resume up and things like that. When I graduated it was banging out letters on a typewriter, electric typewriter. But banging out those letters and mailing them, and going in for interviews, and just a lot of persistence. While I was doing that, I was working different temporary jobs. I had a job working in a bookstore that was closing down, and we were doing inventory management. I had a job as a clerk at a hospital where I was supporting medical records retention, and Xeroxing, did a lot of Xeroxing. So you just have to keep on going and see what happens. A couple months after graduation, I had an opportunity-through some of my peers from my history class-to go down for an interview in Washington D.C. with one of the defense contractors. And, I had the interview, but it just wasn't quite the right fit. But I fell in love with Washington D.C. And DC was to me - just coming from New York area - a wonderful city. I never thought in a million years that I would ever leave New York City. I thought that is where I would be forever. But it was really exciting to be somewhere different, and just the history that's there. I was interested in politics, not that I thought I could have a career in politics, but there was an excitement there, and a different type of excitement that wasn't in New York. When I didn't get the job at this contractor, I said, "I'm just going to stay and see what happens." I know this generation thinks that they invented couch surfing, but I did my share of couch surfing when I first started, and this is back in 1979. I was running out of money. I do believe I had under $100, and that was my life savings at the time. But you're young, and you're just like, oh, this is all going to work out, and this is kind of an exciting adventure. So I was getting low on money and I was on the bus, and I passed by a building that said, Washington School for Secretaries. So I pulled the cord on the bus and I got out, and I walked in and I said, "I need a job." And they said, "What's your background?" And I said, "I have a bachelor's and master's degree in History. I'm certified to teach in New York, seventh through 12th grade history and social studies." And they said to me, "How many words a minute can you type?" I was like, okay, it is a start. And so I took a typing test and went back out in the room - and the reason I'm telling you this, because it really speaks to persistence. So I overheard the two placement officers at this temporary employment agency. Somebody picked up the phone and then they said, "Oh, they need somebody at the Smithsonian." I was in the waiting room and I just thought, I have to go for it. I stuck my head in the door and I said, "Send me to the Smithsonian." And they did, and I got a temporary job as a clerk typist at the Office of Public Affairs for the Smithsonian Institution. And that was very exciting because I was doing something that was interesting and fun in the sense that I was around all these people that were doing really interesting and fun things [related to media and public affairs], even though I was Xeroxing and typing, things like that. It just so happened that after I was there for a very short period of time, there were several people that left the organization, and there were openings for me. I ended up taking a civil service test and I became a GS4 clerk typist. And at the time, there was the federally funded side of the house and the privately funded side of the house for the Smithsonian, and I was on the federal side of the house for some time, and then I moved over to the private side of the house. I just remember thinking, this is an opportunity to really learn something new. I'm a very attentive observer, and I do believe in the power to learn and teach yourself things. And so I was typing press releases, and after I typed, I don't know, whatever, 25, 35 press releases, I go, "Oh, I can write one of these things." I was always volunteering for things. Once I had typed the press releases, they'd go out for copying, and then they come back, and then I'd have to fold them, and I'd have to stuff them in envelopes, and then I'd have to glue the envelopes with this little sponge thing. I remember thinking, "This is really not an efficient use of my time." So I did some research and I found a machine that could automate the process. So I did this whole cost benefit analysis saying, "Well, if you purchase this machine, this is how much it's going to cost, and then this could free me up and I can do these other things for you." It's not like anybody taught me how to do that, it just seemed logical to me. And I think what propelled me in so many direction is, if something doesn't seem logical to me then I say to myself, let me figure it out. Let me figure out another way, a better way of doing it. I know that people say, "Are you born that way? Do you learn how to do those things?" I think it's probably a combination of both. I just leveraged my way up. I wrote a couple of articles. There was a Smithsonian news service. I had the opportunity to write some articles for that, because I remember somebody was not there and I was like, "Hey, I'll volunteer to do that." I just think that's really important. You can't wait for things to drop in your lap. It is very important to be assertive and, just go for something if you think that it might be something that you want. After I was there maybe for a year and a half or so - there was an opportunity to have a temporary assignment at the National Air & Space Museum. I moved over there and I worked in the Public Affairs office and also managed special programs and events. So we did all types of special events, exhibit openings, and I ended up working on a team for one of the Inauguration balls [for President Reagan]. We had dignitaries coming in from foreign countries, and so it was very, very exciting at the time. I got to meet some historic figures in aviation and aerospace. At that time, we had some liaison opportunities with different people in the federal government and different government agencies. It wasn't by design, it was just because of where I was at the time, I started to develop a fairly large network of people from the defense industry, the aerospace companies, and this was pre-merger of many of these companies. There were a lot of Washington reps for those companies, and you're just traveling in those circles, and you're at meetings and talking to people. And again, pre-internet, so you have your rolodex [a manual contact storage system], and you make sure you that you get everybody's business card and you start to build that up. I ended up being up at the Air and Space Museum for about a total of three years. Just a wonderful experience. Very exciting, but it was a little bit too structured for me, and it was very hierarchical, and I am an out-of-the-box thinker. Quite frankly, I never quite knew what that meant, because I just thought, well everybody must think this way. I never thought that there was a distinction between people that think within some parameters and people that think outside the box. I am always thinking. I have a zillion ideas. I just knew that it wasn't the career for me. I didn't know what was for me, but I just knew that wasn't for me. I had an opportunity to come out to California to visit my sister who had moved out here, and she was a little over three years younger than me. She was a physics major - that shows the difference of how quickly things started to change. I talked to her when she was going to school, and I said, "Since you are studying physics, do you want to get your Ph.D. and go into academia or do you want to work at a company?" No, she wanted to work at a company. I said, "You should think about engineering, electrical engineering." So she went into electrical engineering and she moved out to San Diego after graduation and she got a job here in San Diego. When I came to visit her, we went down to La Jolla, went down to the cove and stood looking at the ocean, and I thought, "Hmmm, I could live here just as well as I could live there. I think I'll live in San Diego." And that's how I got here without a job. I quit my job at the Smithsonian, which was pretty scary, because that was a really good job. A lot of people covet working there, and I was very appreciative, but I just knew I had to be adventurous and do something new.
WEISS: So you are here in San Diego, no job. This is 1982?
CHOCHELES: It was '83.
WEISS: '83. And then you begin with SAIC? How did that happen?
CHOCHELES: Well when I first got here, again, I just knew the power of networking, and there was an organization in San Diego called GROW. It was a networking organization for women. At that time you just looked in the paper to see where these networking events were being held. I said well, I can generate my resume, and went to one of these meetings, and there was a panel of speakers, women representing different businesses in San Diego. And when I first got down here I thought, well tech is starting to really emerge as a kind of a career path. It was more than aerospace or the defense industry. There was something that was changing. Before if you were in the sciences and technology, and you had that background, you worked for an aerospace defense contractor, or you worked for one of the government labs, or you worked for the phone company, you worked for Bell Labs. It was pretty narrow. I remember hearing about these little companies that were starting to develop. And so I thought, well, I really like technology. Now I have this background in media relations and in public affairs, maybe I'll get into public relations and media affairs for tech. I came down here to San Diego and I started talking to some public relations firms but nobody was really doing tech. The only person that was doing that was Regis McKenna up in the Bay Area, but I thought that people would start to develop that here. I talked to a bunch of different agencies, and then I ended up getting a temporary job with the Stoorza Agency, and Gail Stoorza was the founder of that company. She was very generous to offer me this opportunity, and I worked on some small media campaigns. But after I did that for a while it just wasn't the right thing for me. They were into media relations for development companies. It just wasn't my domain experience. But in parallel, I was working my network back in D.C. I was like, "Hey, I'm out here now. Who do you know, and who can you introduce me to?" And again, before the internet, you are calling people on the phone and sending them letters. One of my colleagues at the National Air & Space Museum knew somebody who was an administrator at UCSD. And before he came to UCSD, he worked at SAI. He said, "Well I know this little company. They might be interested in you. They're entrepreneurial." Quite frankly, I wasn't even quite sure what that meant. But I said, "Okay." And they were located in La Jolla. I was like okay; I think that this could be a pretty good deal. I was lucky enough to receive an interview and I went down to La Jolla, because that's where SAI offices were at the time. They had several offices down in the Village of La Jolla. I had an interview with a gentleman, and I think I interviewed with about three people. I was just very confident. I wasn't sure what I was going to do. They weren't quite sure either. They explained to me that the company was a research, technical services and engineering company. I didn't have an engineering degree. I wasn't a scientist, but they had different roles. They had business development. They had people that were involved in the operations of the company. Even though it had been started in 1969, it was still a smallish company in San Diego. We started talking, and I remember this key question that they asked me. They said, "Tell us something about yourself." I said, "Well, I'm the type of person if I set my mind to doing something, I will be successful at it." And I truly believe that. If I really want to do something, I'm going to make the commitment and I'm going to do what I need to do. I'll go back to school. I'll read. I'll talk to people. I'll just do whatever I need to do if I really want to be successful at something. Then they asked me a little bit about my network in Washington, and I told them a little bit about this. And they said, "We think that you are the type of person that we want to have here at this company, because you're assertive, you're a go-getter. You are a self-starter." So I thought, okay, this sounds pretty good. I was offered, what would be more like an entry-level position with the company, and it was in the government operations division. We were doing program management support for some government agencies, and I basically learned the business. You had to be quick. You had to be quick on your feet. This was not a paternalistic type company. [It was very competitive, however] many of my colleagues were very, very supportive. So you could go in, "Hey, what about this? What do you think about this, and what exactly do they want me to do?" I learned about government contracting, and worked on different contracts. I found out I did have an aptitude for structuring things, for managing things, for talking to customers, understanding what their issues were. I also had an aptitude for talking to the technical staff and understanding technology and, most importantly, how science and technology is applied to solving specific problems. I also learned that I am a systems thinker, and I like to look at the big picture, and that I can break it down into all these small parts. I can understand how different parts are related. I can understand dependencies, and I think that's a talent I have. And I'm able to work across different levels in an organization. I just feel very fortunate, because that was the place for me.
WEISS: When did you first meet Dr. Beyster, or Dr. B.? I don't know how he was referred to, and what was your first impression of him, and did it change over the years?
CHOCHELES: Yes. I met Dr. Beyster probably around 1990 or so. I remember seeing him in the parking lot. But he wasn't the type of person that you could just go over and talk to. He was always deep in thought. You just know that his mind was constantly going. He was usually with other people. And at the time, being a woman in SAIC, there were women that worked in the company, but there weren't a lot of women that worked at SAIC at the time. I was younger. I was in my late 20s when I started. There were various management levels where you say well, this is really not the level that I'm at now, [but you aspired to that level]. But it's interesting, because I remember I started seeing people with the same briefcase. So I asked about that. I said, "What's the deal with the briefcase?" They said, "Well, if you work for SAIC for ten years, you get a briefcase." So that was my first goal - I said to myself, I'm going to get a briefcase. There was just something about the company where you wanted to succeed. It was almost like you wanted to prove to yourself and to all your peers that you could succeed in this environment, because it was very competitive, and it was very Darwinian. It was really survival of the fittest, and you kept on your toes in terms of doing your job. I felt it was very exciting, and I've always been a very competitive person, so it was perfect for my personality.
WEISS: So in terms of working your way up through the company and staying competitive, were you mainly here in San Diego, La Jolla area, or were you traveling to Washington D.C. to see some of the customers, or work on contracts?
CHOCHELES: Yes, actually to just get back for a minute about Dr. Beyster just to finish that. I did meet him, I believe, in about the 1990s, early 1990s, because I had been supporting some Navy customers down in Point Loma. I was primarily doing that. Then there was an opportunity to come to corporate, and I interviewed for that job, and they wanted somebody that could administer the internal Research and Development program and work with the different Principal Investigators. That was very similar to the work that I was doing for the Navy. In addition to that, one of the other jobs I had at corporate was managing the meetings for the business acquisition committee, and that was a committee of senior executives that met and reviewed bids, research and development bids that the company was going after. So I then was able to attend meetings where Dr. Beyster and some of these senior managers were. [That is when I had the opportunity to meet Dr. B.] We didn't really have formal mentoring when I first got to the company. You're just in the room and you listen to what they're saying, you listen to the questions that they ask, and that was my "Ph.D." - being with all these highly intelligent very accomplished people. I remember them being very, I would say, intense in a good way, but I wouldn't say it was like a super friendly kind of environment when you're working towards capturing these different projects and everything. But what really impressed me is the intellectual capability of most of the people that I worked with. Very, very intelligent.
WEISS: When you say you moved to corporate, where were the corporate headquarters at that point?
CHOCHELES: Corporate headquarters were here in La Jolla, and they had a campus that they had built, a campus of offices off of Genesee.
WEISS: As you worked your way up in SAIC from '85 to '86, you were an analyst for the government operations, and then you went on to a Technology Assessment specialist?
CHOCHELES: Yes. It was just working on different research and systems engineering focused contracts. I'll say some of the titles - they're kind of generic - Advanced Research, Systems Engineering, Program Management Support. But I was involved, again, as I said earlier, in program management support. I was doing a lot of analysis for the customers. Then I was doing some work while I was actually doing research on different technologies that were being developed that maybe could be applied to different problem sets that a government customer had. We were working, for instance, on support equipment for aircraft, and there was testing equipment that needed to be development, or testing equipment that needed to be calibrated. It is interesting, because [on break from college], when I worked as a summer intern at Grumman, I worked in the fabrication plant where they assembled ground support cables for aircraft. Going back to when I was in college, [during that period of time] I learned all these things, and then all of a sudden here I am working for a customer where I do have the background. Even though I haven't been in the military, I have a certain amount of background, not a lot, but I understood basically what are these cables used for, and how do you test them, and things like that. There was some on the job training, but I never did any engineering work or anything like that, because you had the engineers to do that. But I thought what was really interesting about SAIC is that they brought all these people together so that you could have a really strong team of people with various capabilities. That's what I think the customers really liked about SAIC, is that they were getting this kind, sophisticated team of people that really are bringing different skill sets to the table. I feel that I was one of those people that was a little bit different, that made the team a little bit extra special. That's the way I like to think about it.
WEISS: Did you find yourself taking RFPs, request for proposals, from the federal register, and then taking some of that and then translating some of that contract language into English so you could go for the bids?
CHOCHELES: Not necessarily. I think that my role was more understanding what the customers needed. I would say that I was brought in after [the company decided to bid] to a certain extent. There were some times when I did work on proposals, but often times the company would have already won a contract. They were contracts that had a specific dollar value ceiling, and then you'd go in and you'd talk to the customers and you'd [discuss specific issues they have and propose support and solutions to address and those become] task orders under the main contract. The customer would be having a specific issue, and because of the work, the types of things that I was working on, you can't talk about a lot of details, but basically I felt that I was able to understand what the customer wanted, and then I knew a lot about the capabilities within the SAIC line organization I was a part of. So I knew the capabilities of our technical teams, what their backgrounds were, the experience base that we had in integrating different technologies together. [When I was managing operations for Internal Research and Development,] I was then able to go across the company and pull technical teams together to support proposal activities. What I did on many proposals was really understand where the expertise was within the company, and I was able to work with the line organizations and find the people that had the technical domain experience, and then identify the people that had the customer domain experience. Maybe they had Army experience, or Navy, or Air Force, and basically bring these teams together. That's what's very exciting, getting these people together and then working to develop solutions. I was also on review teams. There was a point in time where I was on the company's Risk committee, and that's really interesting, because you're learning about the business side of things. You assess risk vs. feasibility. For example, you might be able to do something, but what's the risk involved in it, and how do you address risk? There was a lot of learning in how do managers make business decisions, and how do managers make good business decisions. What are the decisions that are involved in pursuing your business? How do you create new infrastructure to support that? And that's what was very exciting about SAIC at the time - is that it was almost like a bunch of companies constantly starting up and then growing within this umbrella called SAI, which became SAIC. At the time it was very unique compared to where else you could work.
WEISS: What was the technological landscape at that point here in Greater San Diego? Did you see, in terms of biomed, what was going on the mesa here? What was going on in Sorrento Valley? And were there other hubs starting to happen in the San Diego area?
CHOCHELES: Yes. I started to see two major hubs. I would say communications and then life science and biotech. I believe that was by design to a certain extent. I know with communications some of that work started with the federal government, federal funding, and then it started to branch out into commercial. In terms of life science and biotech, technologies were being spun out of the University. Also I recall some other technologies were being spun out. Then you start to have this cluster forming, and so you have a company that's successful and they go public, or they're sold, and all of a sudden people have money and they're still really interested in the next challenge. So all of a sudden another company forms, and then the people that were working for the first company, they either move over to the new company or they become a member of the board of directors, or an advisory board. And so it's very organic. That's the way that I saw it. I saw this organic approach to building these new businesses in San Diego. I became a member of Athena San Diego, which is an organization for women executives in the high tech and life science and biotech sectors in San Diego, probably about 18 years ago. Through my association with Athena, I saw beyond my immediate world, which was defense. That's how I knew what was going on outside of the defense sector in San Diego, because quite frankly, a lot of sectors are separate. If you're defense, you're in that world. You can't share a lot of information that's in that world, but there are linkages. Through Athena I was able to meet women who were executives in life science, biotech, and in other commercial companies. I was able to meet women that were working for the services companies, the law firms who were addressing intellectual property protection, the accounting firms who had expertise in not only government accounting, but commercial accounting, and the companies who provided human resources and benefits services. that was an education in itself, because you start to pull back from being focused on the technology and you say, you know what, technology is such a small sliver in many respects for companies. I think that true leaders of companies realize that you need to bring in all these people with all this expertise in order to have a successful company. I think that's what was really unique about what was happening in San Diego is they started to build that support infrastructure so that if a company was going to start, it was like which law firms are here that can support them, which accounting firms, which human resources and benefits companies. Then you start to have your whole ecosystem that supports that company as they are attempting to develop and then launch new technology out to the markets.
WEISS: You talk about competitive environment within SAIC. I understand that Saturdays were -
CHOCHELES: Oh yes, Saturdays also included. [Most of us worked six days a week.]
WEISS: Did you look to the possibility of joining other companies, or is that the culture in biotechnology and life sciences here in San Diego?
CHOCHELES: I thought that I would stay at SAIC forever really. What was interesting is that there were people that were there past 65 years of age, and they were vibrant, and they were just getting better. They were working in these amazing areas. I essentially "grew up" in a work environment where there were people who were in their late 60s, 70s, going into 80s that were still incredibly productive. SAIC was very agile. Constantly going into new business areas, so it was very exciting. So where else would you want to go? The other thing is, when I started talking to some other people, once you get into these more formalized companies, you really don't have, you didn't have the option of having really more of a broad based experience. It was more, this is your job, and stay in your swim lane. That was my experience [and that wasn't the right fit for me]. But because of the nature of SAIC, and because I worked at corporate starting in the early 1990s, I had a lot more opportunities, I think, to just be involved in a lot of different things. That's what works for me.
WEISS: Qualcomm was starting to come up through [Linkabit]. Can you tell me some of the larger companies and how many women did you see in the capacity such as yours paralleling executive management?
CHOCHELES: Well, I think that there was always a few women that were involved specifically in the late 80s through the mid-2000s, and I think that you have to look back and you have to say, okay, a lot of the managers were probably graduated maybe ten years before me, so they graduated in the 60s from college. You have to look at that pipeline. Yes, it just takes a while for women who were engineers [to rise through the ranks]. And I feel very grateful, because I did have a very unusual background, and I was able to find these niche positions within the company. After proving yourself, they'd say, "Okay, June, you're good at working these special projects, so we're going to put you over here. We're going to put you over there." If you go to the history of Athena you can see the women who became the CEOs of the different companies in San Diego. Women who then went on to be on boards in some of the different startups. It was definitely a slower process and different challenges, but there is a lot of persistent, very, very bright, talented women in San Diego.
WEISS: The Forbes profile I read talked about you overseeing SAIC's multimillion dollar diversified project portfolio. You were a manager of operations in the IR&D program management office. What was that?
CHOCHELES: Yes. Basically SAIC, the organization of SAIC had divisions, and this changed over time, but they had divisions, which was the lowest profit and loss center within the company. At one point in time, I think there were over 1,000 divisions. And those divisions were focused on supporting specific government customers. In order for these divisions to be positioned against our competition, SAIC created a program - most defense contractors have this - called Internal Research and Development (IR&D). It was a pool of funding [at the Corporate level] where they could allocate a certain amount of funding that was matched by the line organization to address specific technical issues and you thought was going to either help you develop a new system, write software, develop algorithms, develop new technology, something that was not going to be funded by your customer, but you knew that this is where you needed to be in order to be competitive moving forward [in order to develop solutions for various customers]. So every year we had - it was a very similar process to how the government does business - we put out a call for proposals to the divisions, and we had an [internal] review team [to identify projects the company would "invest" in]. We selected between say 125 to 140 projects a year, and the principal investigators that were running those had to have a detailed statement of work and a budget, and technical milestones. We had reviews [throughout the year to discuss technical progress and potential mapping to customer's interest areas]. And the whole goal was to make sure that the Principal Investigator and the technical team was moving in the direction that they said they were going to move in to accomplish specific milestones. Of course, it's R&D so things change over time. But the goal was to have a competitive position across a bunch of different domains.
WEISS: Was this a venture capital corporation that took outside investors and proposals, or was this all internal?
CHOCHELES: The IR&D program used internal funds to fund projects within the company. Since SAIC was employee owned, we did not take any outside venture [to fund these projects]. SAIC did create a venture capital corporation, which then invested in third party companies. So that was different. That was a totally different company. This started, I believe, in around 2000.
WEISS: Well let's talk about the employee ownership and what it meant for you, for your colleagues, and talk about the culture at SAIC that may have kept people involved because of that. Because I understand that they really had a good retention rate.
CHOCHELES: Yes. I hate to sound binary, but I think either SAIC worked for you as an employer or it didn't. People came in and they'd be there for a while, and you're like, you know what, they're not going to make it. Not because they weren't smart enough, it's just that it wasn't the culture for them. I think what was exciting to a lot of us is that there was a lot of freedom in the company to get involved in different things, and be proactive, and have interface with the customer. And I think that was very unusual. In SAIC you could be a technical person, but then really you also had a role in business development, and that was very unusual. It wasn't all these stovepipes, okay, you're only technical, you're only business development, you're only marketing. You had these hybrids. And I think that was one reason why people wanted to stay there. In a way, I think that you felt like you had more control over your destiny, your career. Also, there was a lot of comradery. There was competition, but there was comradery. Then I think the other thing was that employee ownership was a very unusual model at the time. Which company could you go to where the company says, "You get profit sharing? You have the opportunity to purchase stock in the company," and that helped finance a lot of things that were going on. So at the time, it was a very, very unusual model and I think that it just appealed to a lot of people that felt that this was the place for them.
WEISS: So when it started the venture capital focused on third party investment, did some of the people at SAIC see something they wanted to do that made it out of the realm of defense contracting, they said, "Oh, we want to just try to see how this technology is going to go, and we believe in it?" What would the patents be if they were an SAIC employee?
CHOCHELES: Well, in terms of the venture capital corporation, each deal is different, and I wasn't involved in the deals, but I was involved in many meetings where we would meet with the companies who were interested in securing funding from the SAIC venture capital corporation. My team and I were reporting to a senior vice president for research and development. We would ask: where do we think this technology might help us be more competitive? So there had to be a direct link between the technology that was being developed by this third party company and where our customers needed specific types of support. It could have been something in - it could have been software development. I could have been hardware development, but there definitely had to be that link.
WEISS: There was international work that SAIC was doing, eventually it grew to a Fortune 500 company. What kinds of services were you involved in, and were you now traveling as part of corporate to other sites to talk with people?
CHOCHELES: I wasn't involved in the international work per se, but I was involved in some meetings related to this business. We were supporting some oil and gas customers. We had quarterly meetings for management in the company and those would be in different locations in the U.S. I did not do international travel, because by that time we did have the internet and communications just started to change, so you could do a lot of things over email. I did travel domestically. Most of my travel was back to the Washington D.C. area, and then to some of the major SAIC locations, Orlando, Florida was another location. But I'd say that the northern Virginia area and Maryland was probably where I traveled the most back to.
WEISS: You headed SAIC's mentor advisory board. It had one program for junior technical staff. How many women approximately were working for them when you ran the program?
CHOCHELES: Yes, and I think to clarify that, the program, was called 'Leadership for the 21st Century' and it was run out of the HR department at SAIC. I believe I was asked if I'd be interested in being a mentor to a junior member of a team in the company, and I said, "Of course." So I asked to look at the program, and it was a very, very good program, but me being a systems thinker, I drew my block diagram, and what I did was I deconstructed how SAIC did business. I said, "It would be really interesting to have these modules that basically talked about each of the components of how SAIC does business, starting with how does funding get appropriated in Congress." I got together some of my colleagues and I said, "Let's form, like, a subcommittee, a task force." And so I led that. It was really to create a more detailed curriculum. I felt that if new people in the company could really understand how SAIC worked, how do contracts relate to finance, relate to the business development, relate to IR&D. If people could see how things work in a system framework, then I think that they could be more successful as SAIC employees, because that's the type of thinking that you needed to be successful. You couldn't just go, "I'm just going to do my job over here." I think that's true in every company, but I think even more so in SAIC, because sometimes things weren't super clear in the sense that you just do this job over here, and then this person does this over here. It was fluid in many respects.
WEISS: I saw an interview that you did with Pat Heim for the USCD TV Guestbook, and you talked about utilizing her book, Hard Ball for Women in a Male Dominated Workplace was the theme of it. Looking back at the time when you were at SAIC, how did that book and some of her techniques prove useful to you when you did this mentor program?
CHOCHELES: I was actually a mentor for both women and men, and I recommended that book to both women and men. What was really interesting about that book is that she addresses communication techniques, and that's something that was interesting to me. There are different ways that men communicate and women communicate. Of course, sometimes it's not gender specific, but there could be different styles of communication [between the genders]. The older I get, the more I realize that yes, there is a wide spectrum of how people behave. One thing I think that helped me in a sense was that I was young when I started at SAIC [and I was very open to learning and growing]. I think I had one of the first Compaq computers when I got to my office with a double floppy disk drive, and then we started to get the internet up, and networking. [I essentially grew up with the technology as it was rolled out into our operations.] Email was very helpful to me in my career, because I was able to talk to people all over the country. Maybe they had never met me before, but they saw my title and sometimes as a woman it is different if you're not face-to-face and they don't see that you're young. They don't see anything about you [and just have to read what you have to say]. I think that technology helped me in my career. I remember talking to other people about that. The goal was to be very succinct in your emails. That was a shift in many respects [from having a long conversation with someone]. The other thing that I found in her book is developing your alliances. I didn't always like this - but I learned that sometimes I'm going to have to generate my alliances and then have those people actually present things. I'm still going to be part of it, but I may not necessarily get the lead there. That's just the dance that you play, and I see men do that as well. So I think that sure, were there challenges? Yes. Were there a lot of women when I was coming up? Not a lot of women in management, but that's just the way that it was, and it just worked out for me [mainly due to a lot of hard work, dedication and perseverance].
WEISS: How would you characterize the relationships and exchanges of information with the San Diego based labs, companies, and university researchers? Did you have a way of trying to make sure that communication was open and try to get people hired locally out of the universities at all in a variety of fields?
CHOCHELES: Yes. There is a lot of networking that goes on in San Diego. CONNECT is another organization where I worked at briefly after I left SAIC in 2006. I worked there for under a year as the Chief Operating Officer. CONNECT has several networking events a year where there are students from all the universities who attend. There are members of the academic community in general. There are members of the business community. They all get together and if you're a student and you want to stay in San Diego, then you're going to be proactive about connecting with companies. There are a lot of mechanisms that are available on San Diego to bring people together. UCSD had a program where they work with industry members to do joint research projects. I know at SAIC we teamed with UCSD; we teamed with universities all the time to go after government contracts. Sometimes we teamed on internal research and development programs, and that's actually how I got involved and interested in intellectual property. Once you started doing those deals with third parties such as universities, then intellectual property becomes a critical path. I'm not an intellectual [properties] attorney, but I wanted to know everything about it, and so that helped me bring in the right people and understand where SAIC wanted to have a specific position compared to working with somebody else.
WEISS: Did that really relate as much as anything to the patents that may have been created at SAIC?
CHOCHELES: Yes. I think what's important is that when you - again, I'm not a patent or intellectual property attorney, but when you go into a potential deal with somebody, it's very important that you document all the pre-existing intellectual property that you have, because your party comes to the table and has developed certain things. They may have patents. They may have trade secrets. Then the other party has their own stuff. When you come together and you work together, then you're going to generate something else together. So ownership is very, very important. There's a lot of intellectual property expertise here in San Diego. Many firms that have expertise in different areas related to Intellectual Property.
WEISS: Because you work with so many defense contractors, was there any special effort to hire veterans, especially women veterans, as the company expanded?
CHOCHELES: I don't recall any specific programs per se, but because there's a requirement if you're supporting a particular government customer, they often have a requirement to have people on the team with certain domain experience, military domain experience. I think it was just a given if you have military background, one of the first places you might go to inquire about a job was at a defense contractor [in San Diego]. I think it was in the 90s, where there was some sort of special program at SAIC that was focused on bringing in veterans who had retired from the military, but it was quite common [for people with military experience to be considered for positions]. It wasn't like other companies where there had to be direct outreach, because this was just a common path where you go from your military position and then you look for opportunities where you can use your skill base and experience base that you develop while you're in the military.
WEISS: I would like to talk with you a little bit now about when you found a way to look for other career options beyond SAIC. Why did that happen, and what have you been doing since then?
CHOCHELES: Around 2004/2005 timeframe things start to change a little bit at SAIC. There was a change in management. Dr. Beyster had stepped down from his CEO position. They had brought in some new management, and there was discussion about moving the corporate headquarters back to the northern Virginia area. At the time, I had some family commitments that were very important to me and I was not able to relocate. Even though they said that it probably wasn't going to happen for a couple years, I started talking to my network here in San Diego, and I had a very nice network that I had developed specifically with the women that I had met through Athena. I started thinking where might I want to work. There was various companies, but I had identified the CONNECT organization, which is a support organization that had spun out of UCSD maybe one and a half years before that - or maybe at the time when I start thinking they might have still been at UCSD - but they were getting ready, or they had just spun out. They worked with probably 80 to 100 companies every year, startups in San Diego. I said, oh, that would be really fun to do that. I talked to some people that were working there and it just so happened that the COO that was working there was going to be retiring, and she recommended me for the job, and I was able to secure that position in the summer of 2006. I enjoyed working with that organization. It was essentially a startup because they were recently independent from UCSD. So it's generating all your own revenue to cover your expenses. I enjoyed meeting new people in the community that I had some preliminary activity with, but I just spent more time with them once I got to CONNECT. It was a very, very challenging position, and it gave me a much greater appreciation for what Chief Operating Officers do, because I thought I knew what they did. I had been in operations at SAIC. But this was running operations for the equivalent of a small company. After I had done that for several months, I realized that the COO position is just not for me. I greatly respect the position, but I really wanted to do some other things, and I missed having day-to-day interactions with the technical folks, and solving problems, and I missed actually just having my hands more in that. I parted ways with CONNECT, and that was fine, and I wasn't sure what I was going to do. I said, maybe I'll do a little bit of consulting, and I also needed some greater flexibility in my schedule due to some family commitments. There had been several other people that were starting to leave SAIC. There was a little bit of an exodus for people that wanted to remain in San Diego. We started having this informal network, you know, who's left the company? Who's doing what? I started to get some calls from some of my former colleagues that were now working for different companies. "Can you come and help us with this proposal. You're doing some consulting. Would you be interested in doing some consulting for us?" I thought, I'm just going to form a small consulting company. And because of my experience as a COO, and running the CONNECT organization for a while, I knew exactly what I needed to do. Through my connections at CONNECT and Athena, I contacted a law firm. I formed a limited liability corporation. I talked to some accounting folks, got my benefits in order, and moved my 401(k). I created my local entourage of support companies, and it was actually easier than I thought because I had this experience [from working at CONNECT]. Of course I'm type A, overbooked, working on a couple of different contracts for folks, and I was off and running. Again, it was very fun because I was helping some of these smaller businesses in San Diego grow and win contracts. I also had an opportunity to work as a part-time employee at UCSD, and I worked on a contract with Dr. Mary Walshok at Global CONNECT. That was a very, very interesting experience. We were working as a subcontractor on a Department of Labor contract where we were evaluating regional programs that were being funded by the Department of Labor [under the WIRED Initiative] to spur economic development in regions of the U.S. that were underperforming economically. I along with my team members were able to go to places that I never would have been before. Talked to people in economic development. Talked to people in the government there, the state governments. Really trying to understand some of the key issues that I personally was not familiar with in some regions of the U.S. In Mississippi, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Maine - places that were vibrant during the manufacturing era in the U.S. but were still trying to recover. It gave me an appreciation for some of the challenges in education, such as high school dropout rates. Then all of a sudden the lightbulb went on in the sense that I said, you know what, if we can help small businesses form and grow throughout the U.S., this could have a major impact on regional economic development. I became very, very interested in [small business and] regional economic development. Right when I became interested in regional economic development, I got a call from [Mary Ann Beyster at] the Foundation for Enterprise Development (FED). They had won a contract to support the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which is a research agency within the Department of Defense. The DARPA Small Business Programs Office was looking for some mentors to help the small businesses that had received research grants to help them with commercialization and transition of their technology into the defense supply chain. Quite frankly, I felt that this was the perfect job for me. I couldn't have planned it in a million years, but it was just a really, really good fit. I worked with Mary Ann Beyster, who was the President of the Foundation for Enterprise Development to build that program up over several years. I worked on that program [as a consultant to the FED] supporting the DARPA Small Business Office until about 2014 [and then the program moved to another Prime contractor and I supported the program for another year]. We worked with probably 100 or so small businesses every year throughout the U.S. Helped them identify potential teaming opportunities within the prime contractor community. Helped them identify follow-on funding within the federal government [to support their research activities to mature technology]. Helped them identify and understand potential applications for their technology. Some of them had really interesting ideas and prototypes, but because they didn't [have the defense domain experience they didn't fully] understand where their technology could fit into existing defense systems. Again, I used the systems approach to address. [We developed tools to help the companies determine] where they would potentially fit in the supply chain and how the technology would be integrated into an overall system [that would be deployed in an operational environment]. That was a very, very rewarding job, and I like to keep up with reading about these companies on the internet. Where are they now? I like to think that the team that I worked on, helped them figure out how they could be a sustainable small business. I personally still believe that small businesses are the economic engine for economic development in the U.S., and it's still very near and dear to me. I also worked as a subcontractor to San Diego State University. They were funded by the Small Business Administration to support small businesses in San Diego who were interested in either entering the defense sector or growing their business base in the defense sector. We supported training and mentoring for that program. It was called the San Diego Regional [Innovation Cluster] (SDRIC).
WEISS: You also continued to remain active in Athena, and you were the winner in 2010 of the Athena Pinnacle Chairman's Award for the Board of the Athena Foundation. How did that organization evolve from the time that you first started working with them when you were with SAIC?
CHOCHELES: I was directed to join Athena by my management, because SAIC had become a member of the organization. Quite frankly, I didn't want to be part of a women's organization. I didn't want to be segregated. I wanted to be part of the big picture. You have all these preconceptions. What is it going to be like? And, you think, I don't really know if I want to do this, and what are my [male] colleagues at SAIC going to think if I join this organization? When I got there, it was a really, really wonderful experience. I got to meet a lot of women who were not in defense sector, but we all had a lot of similar issues. We had work and family issues that we talked about, or whatever issues we were dealing with at the time. [As a woman there's always a lot of juggling work and family.] I think it's now different in 2016, but at the time, 20 years ago, I think women had different issues. [Many challenges climbing the corporate ladder, but many issues] still the same today - primarily having lead role in caring for children, and aging parents, and that sort of thing. We were able to share not only experiences, and challenges, and solutions for some of those issues, but we also had the opportunity to talk about career strategy, and how do you basically negotiate around certain issues that you have. It was really this wonderful opportunity to share information amongst ourselves in a supportive environment. The other thing that I was really interested in is that Athena had a small scholarship fund where they raised money every year and then they awarded scholarships to five young women who were graduating from high school in San Diego and were going to be pursuing undergraduate studies in a Science, Technology, Engineering & Math (STEM) field. When I came to Athena, it was 16, 17 years ago, I asked how much money was being raised. And they said, "Oh, about $10-12,000." So I started to do the math, and I said, "Okay, so there's 500 women who are executives in San Diego, and we're only raising this amount of money?" I said, "We can do better than this." I started an initiative where I challenged the organization. It was fun. It was a fun initiative. We challenged every woman in Athena to give up one new pair of shoes or one new purse, or something else, just one thing, and give $100 to Athena. So this was just a really fun initiative and over the next couple years we increased the scholarship funding from $10,000 to $12,000 to over $100,000 annually. All of a sudden, it showed the power of people getting together, working on a problem and getting behind a really great creative solution. That is really what SAIC was about. It was the same type of thing. You see something that's not quite right. You get a bunch of people together, and you just go for it. I find that to be very exciting. The Athena Scholarship Program is still going strong. The first award I received from Athena - A Pinnacle Technology Award - was for my role supporting women at SAIC, and then my second Pinnacle Award - The Chairman's Award - was for the work I did for the Athena Scholarship Program. Now I am a member of the Athena Foundation Board, which oversees the scholarship program. I served as the President of the Athena Foundation Board for two years, and now I'm continuing as a member of the board.
WEISS: Is Athena specifically focused to women in STEM?
CHOCHELES: Yes. Yes, women in STEM and then the supporting organizations. The services organization, law firms, accounting firms. You could be a CPA [or lawyer], and your firm supports STEM companies.
WEISS: You had mentioned some role in helping high school age women in doing something at UCSD. What's that all about?
CHOCHELES: The women that we give the scholarships to are high school students. They could be going to college at UCSD or San Diego State, but they can go anywhere in the United States. But this is basically to support them with their tuition payments as it's very, very expensive to go to school. We recognized that early on. This is a merit based scholarship, so there's a whole proposal process. The scholarships are awarded, there's a committee, but they're awarded based on merit. There's been over 60 scholarships that we've awarded and some of these young women are now in medical school, or are doctors, they're researchers [or engineers]. So we would, of course, like them to come back and work in San Diego companies, but it's really supporting the pipeline and creating a network. Now with Facebook and LinkedIn, we're able now to connect with some of these women that we lost touch with and also create a network. We do have in Athena a group on LinkedIn, and these women can start to communicate with each other and help each other in their career trajectories.
WEISS: Speaking of talent in San Diego now, what keeps people here and what draws them to the Silicon Valley. And please talk about competing for talented professionals here and what are the challenges, especially for startups here in San Diego?
CHOCHELES: I don't feel qualified to talk to that, but I think that there's still a mystique about Silicon Valley. I've never worked there. I haven't done a lot of business there, but there's certainly a lot of venture capital up there, and there's an ecosystem, and it's different. I think each region is different, because you have startups in New York. You have Austin. You have Boston. You have San Diego. And there's a different culture in each one of those places. I think that probably there's the most amount of venture up there right now, and I think that it's just so established that people think that that's the "go to" place. There are benefits to being in San Diego. I think that it's very collaborative here in San Diego. I think that you can pick up a phone and talk to people even if they don't really know you; you can get introduced. It just seems like it's smaller in many ways, and then you have access. It seems to me that you have better access here than you do in other places. So it's a secret. You don't want it to get super big, but I think there's still a lot of opportunities here. The lifestyle is really great. I know housing is expensive now, it is one of the challenges. It's expensive up in the Bay Area too.
WEISS: Where are all the hubs today in San Diego? People keep talking about a hub here and a hub there. Where would you identify the different areas where these innovation hubs are emerging?
CHOCHELES: I think that Sorrento Valley was one of the original hubs, and then here right off of Genesee Campus Point. Then you have the Mesa where all these biotech and life science companies are. There's a hub up in the Carlsbad Vista area. Things are happening now in downtown San Diego. I think that there are just so many different opportunities, and I think that one of the challenges is transportation. More public transportation, affordable housing for young recent graduates that are just starting. These are some issues that I know City Council is addressing here in San Diego, which they're addressing in other cities within say North County and down in the San Diego Bay Area.
WEISS: You have also been on the board of the San Diego Aerospace Museum and do you continue to facilitate projects or exhibits, or is there a special love with that? Do you maintain connections with any colleagues from the Smithsonian Air & Space where you first started?
CHOCHELES: Yes, I was on the board of the San Diego Aerospace Museum for a few years, but that's been many, many years ago. You have to pick and choose because there are only so many hours in the day. I always say I could be much more productive if I didn't have to sleep. I'm not engaged with the Aerospace Museum now. I try and support them when I can [such as being a sponsor for their annual golf tournament that raises funds for their educational programs]. I was a member for many years, and now support through donations. I decided that my primary volunteer efforts were going to be with Athena. I'm also involved in a national STEM-focused organization. I am a member of the San Diego chapter of Achievement Rewards for College Scientists (ARCS). Before I became a member I was a member of their Community Advisory Council for many years, and I started when I was at SAIC, so that was over ten years ago. I really just wanted be involved to learn more about the organization and also identify potential employees for SAIC]. That organization was founded in the 50s by the wives of scientists and engineers post-Sputnik. They wanted to ensure that there would be a pipeline of scientists and engineers to work on important problems for the U.S. I formally joined as a member about two years ago. ARCS provides funding for graduate students in STEM fields at UCSD, San Diego State, USD, and the Scripps Research Institute, and we provide funding for about 60 graduate students each year. Again, we're building the network. The ARCS Community Advisory Council helps the ARCS students get connected if they want to work in San Diego after they graduate. So I like to create these ecosystems where you have these communication mechanisms where you have academics, you have the companies, and then you have these organizations that facilitate the interaction between them. It's really all about keeping the best and the brightest in San Diego, and also helping to grow companies that are here. Bring in some new blood and startups, whatever. Whatever anybody wants to do, we're here to support them.
WEISS: So looking back over years at SAIC, when the company went public, and you talked about that whole culture of employee ownership, and you look back on your time there, can you talk to me about what that meant for you personally and how you saw maybe a change in the company as you look back over your time?
CHOCHELES: I actually left before the company went public. But just talking to some of my colleagues, they just said that the company became a little bit more "traditional." Priorities change with public companies that have external stockholders. You may not be willing to take the same level of risk that you were willing to take before, because you want to maintain that proposed growth trajectory. People want to know that you have a plan for growth that's going to increase the stock price. For me, the company was becoming more "traditional". I was told "You need to have a [succinct] description, for what you do." And I said, "Well, I do this. I do that." "No, we're going to narrow things down." So I think when that happened it felt like the company was becoming a little less entrepreneurial [and you had to stay in your swim lane]. But also it was a function of the size of the company. When a company gets to be several billion dollars, in order to manage it, you have to have a little bit more structure and things like that. But the culture was just different. Plus, when you have different people that are in senior management, they have their own culture, and then they bring that culture in. I like to be pretty Zen about it. It's not good or bad. I just felt that it's different, and then you have to determine, is that the right fit for me anymore, or do I go do something else? So you have to make those choices.
WEISS: Are there other people that you think that should be interviewed for this project, either within SAIC or from other companies that you've had interactions with?
CHOCHELES: Yes. Actually, I have a bunch of names, so I can give those to you afterwards. But yes, I think that there's women who have started companies and have been CEOs of companies, not necessarily in defense, but I have been a member of Women in Defense, which is a sub organization of NDIA, National Defense Industries Association. I've also been a member of AFCEA, which is Armed Forces Communications & Electronics organization. So between those organizations and Athena, I'm happy to provide you with a bunch of names that I think they'd be more than happy to speak with you.
WEISS: Are there comments you want to add as you look back on this amazing interesting career that's still evolving?
CHOCHELES: Yes, actually what I'd like to say is, sometimes you think you have to have it all figured out, but when I mentor younger folks, or even folks my age, I say, "Be an opportunist to a certain extent. Look for opportunities that are presented to you and that you may have never thought of and just consider those." Because you can talk yourself out of a lot of things. When somebody said, "I'm going to introduce you to SAIC." I could have said, "Oh, well, I'm not a scientist. I'm not an engineer." You could overthink it. Instead, I thought about my background, and I thought about my successes, and I thought about what can I bring to the table, and what makes me different and unique? A lot of it is your ability to learn and grow, and I think that's really, really important, because sometimes you think, well, I have my four-year degree, I'm done. If you really want to be a successful person, you need to keep on learning and growing. I know it sounds very cliché, but I think that's very, very important especially with technology. Things are changing and I know I am just constantly trying to keep up with what's going on from a technology standpoint. Another thing is that I think it is really important to maintain your enthusiasm and curiosity. I remember reading a lecture that was given by the physicist, Richard Feynman called something like, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. That is my philosophy. I love to learn new things. If you have that interest in learning new things, it's going to enable you to just do so many different things that you never thought about. So, if I could leave to whomever is listening to this-and it is exciting to think that maybe somebody in the year, 2075 or something is going to be listening to this-I would say: What should your philosophy about life be? To come full circle, this reminds me of my project that I did about the Greek playwrights, and a lot of those Greek playwrights - when you read about their philosophies - there's just so many things that are applicable today. You need to start with what is your core philosophy is, and how is that going to be with you through your life trajectory? I'm excited to see what's next.
WEISS: Thank you so much for spending your time, lending your expertise, and giving a lot of people, future listeners to this some exciting possibilities for their life.
CHOCHELES: Thank you. I enjoyed it. Thank you for asking me to participate.
END OF INTERVIEW