Engineering Graduates Bring Tech Skills and Gwara Gwara to the Lone Star State

When Jeffrey Jude-Ibe ’20 flew to Dallas in September to begin work as a quality engineer at Texas Instruments, Kelvin Siebeng ’19, the person who put the semiconductor giant on his job-search horizon, picked him up at the airport. With 3 full-time offers from major corporations and another from the FBI at his choosing, Siebeng also cemented the deal.

“Kelvin described TI as a company that reengineers itself constantly to meet the market’s demands. As an engineer, I like that idea of constantly learning and adapting,” he noted, adding that he’d highlighted other key considerations for a recent college graduate starting out in the world: the company’s strong employee retention programs and profit-sharing.     

Siebeng, a manufacturing supervisor for the company for the past year, oversees production of its core technology, the semiconductor chip, “from scratch – from the moment the silicon comes into the lab to the moment the finished chip leaves it. I’m involved from start to finish.” As a budding entrepreneur who would like to launch his own startup someday, his job affords a close-up view of the heart of an industry and the technical prowess, soft skills and discipline required to run it optimally.

But he saw a fitting role there for Jude-Ibe, who is more interested in power electronics, based on the company’s huge business supplying devices to the automotive, industrial and personal electronics markets, among others.

“We manufacture, test and sell analog and embedded semiconductor chips that read real-world signals such as temperature, pressure and humidity, process the data digitally, and then send it back in analog signals to be read by the consumer,” Jude-Ibe explained, noting that the chips speed up the process of “making real-time decisions.”  

His job is to analyze digital power controllers that are returned to the company to determine what happened when the embedded processer chips in digital power supplies and controller devices fail.

The two are now roommates in Dallas. While they pursued different majors in college – Siebeng in industrial engineering and Jude-Ibe in electrical engineering – they overlapped in organizations such as the National Society of Black Engineers and the African Student Association. Siebeng’s family moved to the United States from Accra, Ghana when he was in high school, while Jude-Ibe, who was born in New York, has extended family in Nigeria’s Imo State.

Indeed, Jude-Ibe traces his fascination with engineering back to his many visits with cousins in his family’s village. “The houses run on generators and whenever they’d fail, I would go out to help fix them with my dad. I chose the power track because of those experiences with generators – and seeing how impactful they are in communities.”

Both also love Afrobeats and may be the first devotees to entertain Dallas with live performances of mesmerizing, liquid moves such as “gwara gwara,” the South African dance craze. Thursday evenings, the two take to the Trinity Skyline Trail that overlooks the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge and the skyscrapers of downtown Dallas, turn on their JBL speaker and begin gyrating.

“There is a lot of simultaneous upper body and leg movement – it’s ‘body wiggly’ – and people will sometimes ask us, ‘How do make those moves?’” Siebeng noted of awestruck observers.

His friend’s final pitch, Jude-Ibe recounted, was Dallas itself. “He said that the folks here are very welcoming, the weather is great, the food is “delish” and expenses are cheap. And he always seemed to be up to something fun whenever we spoke.”

His move to Texas, it turns out, has been as smooth as his dance moves. 

“It hasn’t been a culture shock at all. I love the food, especially barbecue. Kelvin told me how much he appreciated the Dallas community. I definitely get a sense of that southern hospitality here.”