Educating students to succeed in the global workplace isn’t just a lofty slogan. Today it’s a necessity. Hundreds of UT Knoxville alumni work in China or travel there frequently. Tennessee Alumnus thanks the many alumni who sent information about their experiences. Unfortunately we couldn’t feature all of them. Here are a few that represent just what a small world our planet has become.
In 1956, on a lark and with a lust for adventure, five UT students departed Knoxville for Alaska, where they spent the summer working in a gold mine. The Territory of Alaska, still 3 years shy of statehood, was a sparsely populated frontier of less than 200,000 people. The heaviest traffic on the only highway between Fairbanks and Anchorage occurred in July, when an average of 42 vehicles a day traveled the road. Oil would not be discovered at Prudhoe Bay for a dozen years yet.
A prodigy in many respects, Clarence Leon Brown completed Knoxville High School in 1906 at the age of 15 and received special permission to enter UT. Four years later, he graduated with two degrees in engineering. He learned to fly during World War I and served as an instructor in the U.S. air corps. After he ran his own successful car dealership in the early 1920s, he talked his way into a job in what was then called moving pictures.
For years Cormac McCarthy, Knoxville’s most famous living literary son, had something of a cult following. He seemed doomed to labor under the aesthetically fulfilling—if financially problematic—moniker of “writer’s writer,” a serious craftsman whose work remained a secret shared among a few fiercely loyal souls. The secret is now out.
Many people say they want to travel when they retire. Globe-trotter Ginny Thigpen says, “Do it today.” This retired college professor from Gallatin, Tennessee, has visited six of the seven continents and has Antarctica on her schedule for ’08 or ’09.
Investing your money can be about as serious as a heart attack. Unfortunately, not every investment is a wise one. Think of the impulsive trader who buys on the basis of a hot tip, regardless of whether the bulls are raging or the bears are hunkered down.
Blair Pancake (Knoxville ’05) won the Miss Tennessee title, UT Chattanooga alumnus Leslie Jordan won an Emmy, and we catch up with two Katrina evacuees who were featured in the Summer 2006 issue—that and more in this installment of UTopics.
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