Working for California

Albert Wong likes to say he’s partially retired — the truth is, he’s waiting for another opportunity.

“I don’t like to stay still,” says Wong, from his home office. “We entrepreneurs like to start things.”

Even before graduating from college, Wong showed that drive and spark to move ahead, to seek opportunities. A native of Hong Kong, he came to California as a foreign student in 1969 attending Orange Coast College before transferring to Cal State Fullerton. To make ends meet, Wong worked two, sometimes three, part-time jobs while earning his bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering. He graduated in 1975.

“Right after I got married in 1973, I joined Datum Corp., which was close to not only where I lived but to school. I would ride my bike over, work for a while, then go on to school for classes, then go back to Datum. Three or four nights a week, I worked in a Chinese restaurant. I also worked at Denny’s and other restaurants. That was my life.”

In class, he was impressed by the quality of the teachers he had, including a part-time instructor who shared her work experience with her students. “She had a profound influence on my education,” Wong notes of the female engineer—a rarity in the early 1970s. “She added a different color and practicality to my education. I found that you need information beyond textbooks, beyond theory.”

After graduation, he was promoted to design engineer with Datum. “I learned a lot, especially the importance of product practicality,” Wong remembers. “I learned to take the tools I had learned at Cal State Fullerton and to use them.”

It is this mix of the theoretical and the practical that he appreciated as a student. Recently, when he critiqued the revised electrical engineering curriculum, Wong expressed support for the more interdisciplinary approach being taken in the major and the new courses that stressed industry standardization, ethics, business basics and professionalism. One such course is titled Engineering, Economics and Professionalism, which incorporates not only skills in engineering but business ?—??something he believes should be understood by all students. Wong also supports the university effort to think globally.

His own career reflects that expansion to the global market.

In 1980, Wong joined friends Safi Quershey and Tom Yuen to found AST Research, which became a worldwide leader in the design and manufacture of products for the blossoming personal computer market.

As chief technology officer and executive vice president, Wong was responsible for both development and manufacturing of AST products, and helped position the technology firm as a global business, establishing AST FarEast in 1985, AST Taiwan in 1987 and AST China in 1988.

In 1998, Wong was recruited by Tokyo-based Clarion Company Ltd. to lead the company’s newly established North America research and development center in creating in-vehicle computing and multimedia products. In 2003, he launched Avantech Systems with the goal of commercializing U.S. emerging technologies to the Chinese market.

“I am greatly in debt to this country and to all that it has given me,” Wong says. “There is no magic bullet to becoming successful, but education does give you the learning, the tools and the confidence to go forward, and Cal State Fullerton was key to achieving my goals.”