Warren R. and Yvonne B. Waggoner Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Mechanical Engineering

In June 2006, Warren and Yvonne Waggoner funded the Warren R. and Yvonne B. Waggoner Endowed Scholarship in Mechanical Engineering and in July 2010 the endowment was upgraded to the Warren R. and Yvonne B. Waggoner Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Mechanical Engineering.

Warren wanted to fund an endowment because as a Distinguished Alumnus, he felt an obligation to be an example for someone else. The endowment is a way his success can become an inspiration for a mechanical engineering student who may need encouragement and direction.

When selected as a 1999 commencement speaker to UT engineering graduates, Warren told his young audience, “With your degree from UT’s College of Engineering, you will have the privilege, the authority, and quite frankly, the responsibility to determine the quality of engineering education your successors will obtain, and earning a degree from this nationally recognized engineering college continues to increase in value.”

As a freshman student at The University of Texas who grew up in Paris, Texas, a rural, northeast Texas city, and studying mechanical engineering, Warren immediately found himself struggling to develop his mathematics and science skills to compete with students from larger, better-resourced urban Texas high schools. Although overcoming this academic deficiency may have enhanced his personal drive, this hardship created his interest in establishing the Warren R. and Yvonne B. Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Mechanical Engineering.

After earning a Mechanical Engineering degree from the University in 1974, Warren joined Exxon Company, USA’s Production Department in New Orleans as a reservoir engineer. After several drilling, reservoir, and production engineering assignments in New Orleans, Houston, and Corpus Christi, he made a career change to information systems, supervising an engineering applications development section. Subsequent management assignments included working in computing centers in New Orleans and Houston before managing Exxon Mobil Corporation’s Global Data Center in Houston.

As Exxon Mobil Corporation’s Engineering Recruiting Team Captain for UT during the period of 1997-2010, Warren’s team identified and facilitated the hiring of 270 full-time UT engineering graduates and 250 UT Engineers for internships and COOPs. He says that knowing that his team helped enable a livelihood for these students and their families is most gratifying!