Skills Learned at UC San Diego Lead to Successful Engineering Career

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This story appears in the spring 2025 issue of UC San Diego Magazine as “Full Circle Impact.”

When Jim Kaplan ’84 arrived at UC San Diego in 1980 as a first-year student from Lindsay, California, a small agricultural town in Tulare County in the Central Valley, he didn’t know a single person. Yet today, the connections and friendships he made are among his fondest memories from campus.

“The people I met at UC San Diego exposed me to broader thinking — both on the academic side from my professors, and also on the human side,” says Kaplan. “I learned a lot from my friends from different backgrounds than my own.”

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering from Thurgood Marshall College at UC San Diego, Kaplan forged a successful career as a chief engineer at Lockheed Martin. His work has taken him around the globe — from states throughout the U.S. to more than a dozen countries.

According to Kaplan, the lessons he learned at UC San Diego helped lay the foundation for his career success. At Lockheed Martin, he spent nearly 40 years working with various teams in the organization to solve customers’ most challenging problems creatively.

“It was always very energizing to me to be able to pair academics with the thinking and interpersonal skills I learned at UC San Diego and apply that at work,” says Kaplan

Helping others to achieve their goals is a through line in Kaplan’s life. He has been a steadfast supporter of his alma mater, becoming a member of Chancellor’s Associates, a group of generous donors whose annual gifts make a difference for students and other key initiatives on campus. He also funded the Jim Kaplan Chancellor’s Associates Scholarship, an undergraduate scholarship for STEM majors that has a preference for students from Tulare County. As an endowed scholarship, it will provide funding for students in perpetuity.

“There are very talented, bright people in Tulare County, and why not give them the same awesome opportunity at such a world-class university as UC San Diego that I had?” says Kaplan. “The scholarship ties me back to my roots and the university I’m so passionate about.”

Looking to the future of UC San Diego, Kaplan is energized by the campus’s growth and expansion.

“I’m particularly excited about the Triton Alumni and Welcome Center, which will open in 2026,” says Kaplan. “We deserve something appropriate and befitting of such a great university.”

Kaplan recently committed a significant planned gift to the campus as part of his estate planning. He designated the gift to provide capital funding for a project at the chancellor’s discretion.

And while the funding will eventually support a key project still to be chosen, Kaplan quips: “I’d love the capital project to be a parking garage because everyone will love me.”