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David Helm, I think is kind of the embodiment of liberal arts. Here's a guy who does advertising,
but he does advertising with a conscience. That is to say he is an expert at, at selling,
he is an expert at design, he's a creative expert, if you will, and he's a guy who thinks
really critically about what he's up to and he relentlessly questions what he does. The
story is told that he started out as a political science major and he said, you know, I think
I would like to take an art course and so he went over and did it and absolutely fell
in love with color and design and by the time he graduated in 1987, he was just absolutely
thoroughly in love with art and particularly, commercial art, and so that's why he wanted
to advertise it. I read his bio. It was very, very impressive and then of course, being
a doubter of almost everything, I went back to double check. And I double checked, I don't
know, the credentials and stuff, but I wanted to find out what do you, what do you stand
for. And so I found some speeches he made and he had given a speech to students at Portland
State University and I read the speech and it was incredibly thoughtful. Again, what
he had done was talking about the whole, the work he does in advertising, but talking about
its place in the world and responsibility and community and what he does then is embody
what liberal arts should be, which is not only learning skills, not only learning facts
and things, but a relentless sense of questioning what it is that we do. He was very successful
early on, started working for a, well he started working here in town, then he moved to Portland,
Oregon and the company that he worked with has an office in Amsterdam and he's transferred
to Amsterdam and has a bit of an international reputation, goes back to the agency in Portland
and at that point was sharing a position. He was working part of the year in Portland
and then partly teaching ethics in advertising at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.
Then he finally goes back to Portland full-time and starts his own studio, his own agency
called Studio Jelly. It is certainly our pleasure to have David Helm represent the College of
Arts and Sciences as this year's Alumni Fellow.