UMass Video Profile: Doug Berthiaume, '71

Waters Corporation, Chairman, President & CEO, Accounting, Isenberg School of Management
Watch as Doug Berthiaume talks about his time at Isenberg and UMass and his view on business and entrepreneurship.  In early 2014 the Berthiaume Center for Entrepreneurship at the Isenberg School of Management was established thanks to the generous financial support of Diana and Doug Berthiaume.

Video Transcript

I come from a working class family. It wasn't likely that I could afford a private university. I always, for some reason, had my sights on UMass Amherst since the time I was in high school. I began as a student at UMass Amherst as an engineering major. I was singularly unsuccessful in that endeavor. Then I had an epiphany, it was an accounting class, and it was kind of like understanding a foreign language to me that I realized that I understood this stuff and it told me how business worked. One of the things early on I understood was that the learning and training that I got in the UMass Amherst business school easily prepared me just as well as the new recruits that I was essentially competing with from Ivy League schools or the Notre Dame's or the large Midwest universities. What UMass taught me or developed in me is the notion that I can go into those uncertain circumstances and come up with a solution that satisfies me. I am very comfortable with uncertainty in the notion that I'm an element of certainty that gets injected into that process. Businesses and industries have long lives. And it's important that you have a long view of your decisions in business and how they affect people both today and how it will affect them over the long term. Most of that came from my early experiences at UMass Amherst. I am Doug Berthiaume. I am the chairman of Waters Corporation. I stand for innovation and entrepreneurship. And I stand for UMass.