His degree in engineering has served Gary Wagner well, even though fairly early in his career he began to redirect his focus to business and management.
“Beyond enabling me to get a real job, my UTEP education was an achievement that proved that I could complete a difficult course of study and compete in a competitive marketplace,” he said.
Wagner, the former president and chief operating officer of Los Angeles-based Ameron International Corp., retired in 2011 after almost 27 years with the company.
Wagner’s military family settled in El Paso when he was in sixth grade. He graduated from Jesuit High School in 1969 and enrolled at UTEP so he could become an engineer like his uncle.
REAL JOB, MY UTEP EDUCATION
WAS AN ACHIEVEMENT THAT
PROVED THAT I COULD COMPLETE
A DIFFICULT COURSE OF STUDY
AND COMPETE IN A COMPETITIVE
MARKETPLACE.”
Gary Wagner
“My uncle was the only relative that had gone to college,” Wagner said. “He was held up as somebody that had been able to achieve more because of his education.”
Wagner had friends who dropped out of UTEP’s engineering program because it was too difficult, but he was determined to challenge himself and finish. He graduated in 1973 with a B.S. in electrical engineering.
Hughes Aircraft Co. in Los Angeles recruited Wagner out of UTEP, and he took a position as a field engineer. During his seven years with the company, he had an assignment in Germany, where the company was rolling out a helicopter missile system. While there, he took classes through an extension program offered by Boston University.
“I was an aggressive, ambitious guy at the time, and I thought that if I wanted to get ahead, I was going to have to keep working and getting more education,” he said. He earned an M.S. in business administration in 1977 from Boston University. When he returned from Germany, he took another overseas assignment in the Middle East. Upon his return to California, he left Hughes and enrolled full time in the University of California, Los Angeles Master of Business Administration program, which he completed in 1982.
He partially attributes his engineering background to helping him secure his next job lending money as an investment analyst for PruCapital, a subsidiary of Prudential Insurance Co.
“There was a bias in favor of people who had engineering backgrounds,” he said. “The assumption was that somebody with an engineering background has a fairly logical way of looking at things, can get into the details and be very rigorous. All those things are necessary to be a successful investment manager.”
However, with interest rates at more than 14 percent in the early 1980s, people were not interested in borrowing money. Three years later, Wagner jumped at the opportunity to become an assistant treasurer at Ameron, a publicly-traded company that manufactured concrete, steel and fiberglass piping and protective coatings at plants around the world. Instead of lending money, he would be borrowing it.
He worked his way up the management ladder at Ameron, from vice president and treasurer to chief financial officer and then president and chief operating officer. As the No. 2 person in the company, he oversaw its day-to-day operations.
His international background served him well during his tenure at Ameron, where he managed the company’s worldwide businesses and was the primary contact for its foreign affiliated companies.
Wagner retired in October 2011 following the acquisition of Ameron by National Oilwell Varco. He and his wife, Karen, continue to live in Manhattan Beach, Calif. One of his close neighbors, and a friend of about 45 years, is fellow UTEP alum John Lapham, a 2013 Gold Nugget Award recipient for the College of Business Administration.
“[Wagner] is determined and has a kind of dogged persistence,” Lapham said about his friend. “He’s very hard-working, and I think that’s really been the reason he’s been so successful. You combine innate intelligence with a really good work ethic and an adaptable personality that people generally like, and that’s a pretty good combination for success.”
Lapham and Wagner both worked for PruCapital, earned M.B.A.s from UCLA, and became very successful businessmen – and both were the first in their families to earn college degrees. For Wagner, his UTEP engineering degree was an important foundation for his success.
“Typically to be a good engineer, you have to have certain skills – you have to be able to work hard, you have to be able to think logically, you have to have an interest in solving problems. Those things will help you succeed in whatever you do,” he said.
While engineering was the path for him, he advised his two sons, now in their 20s, that choosing a technical specialty in college – like engineering – is not the only way to go.
“The one piece of advice I did give them is that they not specialize too early in their lives, and that they try a number of things,” he said. “Go to college and get more of a general background that would serve them well in whatever they wanted to do.”