A Legacy Built to Last: Engineering Alumnus’ Posthumous Gift Supports Student Success
Jeffrey McDonnell (‘85, civil engineering) spent three decades building the infrastructure that moves Southern California's water, and just as much time teaching anyone who asked how it was done. A $500,000 posthumous gift ensures his legacy for years to come.
Always Learning, Always Teaching
McDonnell studied his golf swing the way he studied everything else: as an engineering problem.
He worked out the mechanics, then built a ritual around them, a fixed sequence running from the moment he addressed the ball to the finish of his follow-through. It was a small window into how his mind worked—nothing was too minor to understand properly.
McDonnell grew up in the Inland Empire, where he played baseball and football in high school, and came to Cal Poly Pomona to study civil engineering. He spent the summers of his junior and senior years interning at Pascal & Ludwig Constructors. When he graduated, the firm hired him full time.
He stayed 30 years. He completed the requirements for his professional engineer license while working. He rose to partner and vice president. Then he left for the Santa Margarita Water District, where he served as resident engineer.
The water and wastewater industry is a small world. Every public works project, whether that be a lift station, a reservoir, a dam, or a full treatment plant, requires contractors to formally prove they have executed work of identical scale before. The vetting leaves a finite number of firms, and the people inside that circle tend to keep finding each other, which included McDonnell.
In 2001, on a project to install massive rubber dams across three dirt culvert channels in Orange County, McDonnell sat down in a construction trailer with a younger project manager from the electrical contractor to map out a schedule.
The younger man guessed at durations. Eight days. Maybe 10. McDonnell shook his head. It was not that simple. The two of them worked it out for hours until the schedule was right. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.
Then McDonnell said the words that friend still repeats a quarter century later.
"I will back you one hundred percent," he said. "But don't ever lie to me."
A Man of His Word
That was the arrangement McDonnell offered people: total loyalty, in exchange for the truth.
He was also relentlessly generous with what he knew. Ask him about structural concrete or earthwork or some corner of civil engineering nowhere near your own discipline. He would stop what he was doing and explain it if he believed you sincerely wanted to learn.
That relentless commitment to learning, to being better every single day, and helping anyone who asked—that was McDonnell.
Off the job site he lived vibrantly. He owned two Harley-Davidsons, each customized down to the paint and the chrome. His favorite kind of vacation was flying somewhere new, renting a bike, and riding from place to place. He lifted weights. He practiced yoga. He listened to heavy metal. He traveled constantly and came home with photographs he shared with friends in detail, one by one.
Leaving a Legacy
In 2023, McDonnell suddenly died.
McDonnell left what he had to the handful of people closest to him, and they decided together that a portion of it belonged back to his alma mater. The result is $500,000 to the Cal Poly Pomona College of Engineering: $200,000 to endow a permanent scholarship for civil engineering students, and $300,000 to fund an engineering design bay in his name.
The friends who directed the gift asked not to be recognized. It is credited simply to the Friends of Jeffrey P. McDonnell. The design bay reflects a conviction McDonnell spent his career demonstrating—that the drawing is only ever half the job.
"An engineer can draw absolutely anything on a flat sheet of paper," says one of the friends. "But drawing it doesn't automatically mean you can physically build it in a real-world, 3D environment."
The students who work in that bay will never meet him. Most will know him only as a name.
His friends have made peace with that. What they hope is that he is remembered for years to come. Remembered when a student deep in a project at the design bay will know who it's named after. Remembered when a student receiving a scholarship with McDonnell's name on it will know who to thank.
McDonnell would never ask for that kind of recognition, but he’s always one to help. And this gift from him does just that for generations to come.