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My experience at the University of Oklahoma started
in 1966. I was a high school student at Purcell, Oklahoma.
and got a scholarship to 2 places
Oklahoma State University and the University of Oklahoma
and fortunately for me the
scholarship at the University of Oklahoma was a little larger than the one from OSU,
and so I decided
to go to the university
and it made a huge difference in everything I've done since then.
the thing that happened
it's one of those things that life will lead you in certain ways
and I think sometimes it's
problematic bound, but
it leads you in ways that
you don't expect, but I
got a scholarship. The scholarship had
a requirement for some work
at the University. It was called a Lou-Wentz service scholarship
and it
I was assigned to work in the industrial engineering school office for Dr. Bob Shaprio.
and he had a secretary whose name was Huffmann, Mrs. Huffmann
her husband was a professor
in the geology school, and
they became mentors to me
He got me involved in a company that he had
started, a consulting company, so I was
student engineers for awhile, then ended up as the
team leader, I guess you'd call me, for the students when we'd go out and do projects
I went to law school and
focused on
technical
types of work, things involving technical and scientific
topics, and it's mostly been litigation, lawsuits involving technical issues.
and that's been products liability
and then
in the last fifteen years patent cases, cases involving patents and technology.
Education itself, the industrial engineering education that I got
caused me to be a problem solver
if you think about it,
the things that I do in law
it's a very similar thought process
What you do as a lower it you look at the problem
that the client has,
you look at the elements of the law apply to it,
and then
you apply the law to the facts
and then you come up with some advice for your client. well that is exactly how you solve an engineering problem.
and so the confidence that you get in understanding how to solve a complex technical problem
is the same thing that you have to do when advising clients as lawyer, but the
training that i feel like I got as an undergraduate student in the engineering school,
has prepared me for the things i do as a lawyer today.
Two things. One is that an undergraduate education is not going to be enough
in the world that we will live in
think about
in your beginning as you plan, think about
a graduate degree of some kind
and that doesn't always mean it's an engineering degree
you may tack on a business degree, a masters in business or you may tack on a law degree as I did.
or a graduate education in
engineering, but
I think that it's important, as technical as things are
we all think of that as part of our future
number two
and this is a little
atypical in
someways from an academic thought but have fun, the
school, when I look back at it
my years here at the University of Oklahoma as a student were some of the most fun times of my life.
but I'm not sure I appreciated it at the time
because it was a lot of work also.
I can remember going to go
Texas Tech University,
and one of the faculty members took us down there and we had the big, long, University of Oklahoma red
station wagon, and had the big OU logo on the side, somehow the university had those in those days
and we
got permission to take it on this trip
and so all of us, the students and our professor
we loaded in that station wagon went down to
Texas Tech, and so the
that evening, the professor had he had something to do
and there were two or three of us that wanted to go out
and see if we could find some night life in Lubbock, Texas
pretty hard to find, but in any event,
we went out in the OU wagon
and drove around Texas Tech
and we survived, I don't know how.