Alex Wan stood before a room full of President’s Scholars and said it’s OK to take a nontraditional career path. He used himself as an example.
A President’s Scholar at Tech, Wan earned an industrial engineering degree but went to work on Wall Street after graduating in 1988. He got an MBA from the Wharton School in 1993, then returned to Atlanta to launch his own architectural engineering firm. In 2003, he and a group of friends formed the nonprofit For the Kid in All of Us, which provides toys, backpacks and school supplies to underprivileged children in Georgia.
“I think it was that particular experience that made me realize that my passion wasn’t necessarily engineering or business, it was public service,” said Wan, who ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the Georgia Legislature in 2004.
In 2009, Wan became director of Jerusalem House, a nonprofit sheltering Atlanta’s homeless affected by HIV/AIDS, and won an Atlanta City Council seat as the first Asian-American member.
“You’re going to make a lot of changes throughout your career,” Wan said during the President’s Scholarship Program fall luncheon in the Student Center ballroom. “If you look at my career path, I jumped from engineering to investments, back to engineering, into nonprofit work and now public service. You need to embrace that it will change. Don’t fear it.”
He credited friend Phil Kent, president of Turner Broadcasting, with the statement that “young people today need to remember: Relax, don’t panic. Outside of committing a felony, there’s no mistake that you can make before the age of 30 that you can’t undo.”
Wan confessed that he did experience “the trauma around changing majors. … I started off in chemical engineering. I had all these grand visions of creating this new alternative fuel. Then I hit organic chemistry, and I said, ‘Nope, I’m done.’”
Wan also shared his struggles at Tech. “I ran for interfraternity council president and lost to a guy named Andy McHenry — I can’t believe 22 years later I can still remember this — from Lambda Chi … and the other thing I remember most is my sophomore year I almost got kicked out of the President’s Scholars program. I had a couple of really bad quarters.”
He learned from those experiences.
“Academic probation, that was a pretty scary situation, but there’s nothing more motivating than getting to the brink of disaster,” Wan said.
“And there’s nothing more inspiring than knowing that you have the capacity to recover from it, and you can figure out how to correct it.”
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