Fourth-generation St. Thomian Allyson Gregory understands, as few others her age do, that service provides meaning to life.
After graduating from the University of Maryland in 2004 with a degree in electrical engineering, Gregory, now 29, opted to come back to St. Thomas.
“I wanted to come home and make a difference,” she says, at the risk of “sounding cliché.”
There is nothing cliché about the vibrant young woman born on the cusp of generation Y.
Along with her pressure-filled day job at the V.I. Water and Power Authority, where she bears the title system planning manager, Gregory makes time for Rotaract, Junior Achievement, the Humane Society of St. Thomas, the Women’s Volleyball League and “hanging out” in Frenchtown with her grandfather, Larry Hodge.
Gregory finds nothing unusual about being a female and an engineer. She says there are many women her age in the field.
However, her bent may be genetic. Her father, Dale Gregory, is the chief engineer at the V.I. Port Authority; and his father, Liston Gregory, also worked at WAPA.
Either way, one of her heart’s desires is to go into the elementary schools and educate children about what an engineer does. She has a plan, actually, for doing that.
She hopes to start a program, Aspiring Engineers (AE), based on the model of Junior Achievement or the erstwhile Future Homemakers of America.
“Everybody knows about doctors and lawyers,” she says of the youngsters she would hope to inspire to go into her chosen field. She wants them to know just as much about digital electronics, circuit theory, signal and system theory and semiconductor devices.
However, engineering was not always her goal. At one point in high school she wanted to be a dentist.
“My mom always told me the best way to decide about a career was to try it,” so when she was 17 Gregory interned in a dentist’s office. She says she was fine until “this one surgery.”
She describes becoming faint at the sight of all the blood. “I had to run into the bathroom,” she says.
She never went back.
And apparently has never looked back. Gregory loves her work and identifies her direct supervisor Clinton Hedrington as the person she most admires. She says he gave her a chance and continues to do so.
When he and WAPA Executive Director Hugo Hodge Jr. are away, Gregory is the person who takes over at least some of their responsibilities. On the day she was interviewed she was rushing off to a meeting where she was tasked with filling in for them.
Her work ethic, she says, comes from her parents, Joyce and Dale Gregory. “They work really hard.”
In the wider world, she admires President Barak Obama. “He took the helm of a sinking ship and is not afraid to steer it in the right direction.”
Gregory may have political aspirations herself somewhere down the line. She has thought about running for Senate.
Her platform might include consolidating government operations on government-owned property to save money and passing a law that everyone must have a hybrid vehicles by some as-yet-unspecified year in the future.
She is also not afraid to tackle the hard stuff. Though she gets stressed out sometimes by the negativity surrounding her chosen company, her solution is to face it head on.
“I try to educate,” she says. “Once you educate people, the ignorance gets weeded out.”
Gregory is the product of both public and private education. She split her school years between J. Antonio Jarvis Elementary School and Antilles School.
She said the classes at Jarvis were big; 30 kids to a class. “When you have that, the smart kids always do okay, but the others can get lost,” she opines.
Gregory’s commitment to St. Thomas becomes more vested every day as she continues to work on building her own home. She says she hopes to be finished by December, with a slight roll of the eyes.
She is doing it, as she seems to do many things, methodically and with systematic planning: a few guys working weekends.
When referring to work, Gregory’s permanent grin gets wider as she talks about how bringing young energy to the Authority has led to new technologies and efficiencies that she has a stake in.
She was part of developing a GIS (geographic information system) that is now in place on all of WAPA’s poles.
And speaking of utility poles, when asked what she would choose to come back as, Gregory cocks her head, thinks for a moment and answers, “A bird. They are so free.”
With a barely audible biological clock ticking time off in the future, Gregory acknowledges she would like to have a family someday, adding she isn’t sure where it will fit into her other plans and activities.
“I guess when it happens, it will work out.”
