Ida Cole ’68

Ida Cole ’68 Awarded 2026 UMass Alumni Honors Lifetime Achievement Award

After graduating from UMass Amherst with a degree in mathematics, Ida Cole ’68 spent time as a flight attendant and a programmer for Litton Scientific Systems, a military contractor in California. She later worked for Bank of America, where she used her mathematics degree to perform market research for location planning and global profitability analysis.

Cole broke into the developing Silicon Valley technology scene with a position at Tymshare, which sold online computer time to businesses without their own systems. As an applications expert, Cole managed five offices for the division, which created custom computer programs for Tymshare's corporate clients, including the first banking by phone. This experience led to a position at Apple Computer leading its applications group. After earning her MBA, she became director of marketing for the Apple II and Apple III lines of computers, serving on Apple’s executive staff and representing the company at product launches, including the Macintosh computer.

In 1984, Cole joined Microsoft to run the company’s applications division at a crucial moment, becoming the first female vice president in Microsoft history. She was a key player in Microsoft’s IPO in 1986, representing the company to the investment community and the business press. As her responsibilities grew to overseeing Microsoft’s international products and marketing groups, she took younger employees under her wing and gently mentored them, something that was rare at the time. Under Cole's guidance, the international line swelled from 40 products available in five languages to 360 products in 22 languages—and Microsoft's overseas profits soared. 

Since leaving the business world, Cole has put all her efforts into supporting the arts and financed opportunities for women in STEM. In the mid-1990s, she invested $30 million to purchase and rebuild the historic Paramount Theater in downtown Seattle. She recognized the theater’s vital role in the city’s arts and culture community and rallied former Microsoft colleagues and Seattle’s established families to contribute to the renovation. After bringing the theater into the green, she transferred it to the nonprofit Seattle Theater Group (STG), which she originally founded as the Seattle Landmark Association. The Paramount’s auditorium was named after Cole at its 75th-anniversary celebration in 2003.

Cole has also served as a board president for the Intiman Theatre in Seattle, a board member for Lincoln Center Theater in New York City, and a member of the Tony Awards nominating committee. For her work supporting the arts, Cole was given the Microsoft Alumni Foundation’s coveted Integral Fellows Award in 2013. Just a year after the Microsoft Alumni Foundation recognized her, she established the Mary E. Sherman Scholarship at Ashesi University in Ghana to honor her late sister. The scholarship supports young women engineering students. In addition, she is a founding director of Social Venture Partners, an innovative organization established to encourage creative philanthropy in young people. Social Venture Partners has expanded to more than 29 different cities throughout the world.

Currently, Coles lives in Manhattan, where, for the past 17 years, she has volunteered her time teaching and conducting tax preparation through the VITA program, which provides free service to more than 10,000 moderate-income residents annually throughout New York City.

The UMass Alumni Honors Awards are presented annually by the UMass Amherst Foundation to recognize outstanding alumni who have translated their UMass experience into professional success and meaningful service across different career stages and fields. Honorees will be celebrated at an October 8, 2026, event sponsored by the UMass Amherst Alumni Association in the Campus Center Auditorium.