Sandra Jeffcoat won a Career Achievement award at the 2005 Women of Color STEM Conference for her professional accomplishments in information technology.
At the time, she was chief architect for planning, reporting, and analysis systems, a component of Boeing's Enterprise Financial Transformation Project.
Growing up in rural Virginia, Sandra joined the civil rights campaigns that changed how African Americans lived and did business in the south.
Shortly after graduating from North Carolina's Johnson C. Smith University with a bachelor’s degree, she moved to Ohio to join a computer science program.
The hiring supervisor told her computers were too difficult for women, but Sandra was not deterred. She showed her qualifications and got the job.
Promoted twice in three years, Sandra still got lured away by the NCR Corporation. Mead Paper hired her away again and gave Sandra the task of stabilizing a proprietary database system while mastering a new integrated database management system.
Sandra soon earned industry-wide recognition and got hired again by Datapoint Corporation, then Computer Sciences Corporation, then Eastman Kodak, and finally by Boeing in 1989.
According to runway girl network dot com, Sandra is one of the women who inspired a new generation in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers.
In an interview she gave to Trailblazers, Sandra said her career in information technology began as a dare and her expertise in a complex database system led her to Boeing.
“I find it important that we give back by mentoring others,” she said. Sandra was a familiar face at the Women of Color STEM Conference. She was the first Black woman to be named Technical Fellow at Boeing.
