What happens to Herbsters once they leave the College of Engineering and Applied Science? Where are they now, and how did they get there? We asked two alumni for updates.
Cory Oldweiler
When I was a CU engineering student, there was always an answer, one a finite effort would delineate. But life proved a less soluble puzzle. I changed my goal, aiming to become the contemplative, probing polymath advocated by the Herbst program and epitomized in the Olympian mind of Thanasi. For a time I sought to educate both myself and the public through journalism. Then I fled north where, amid stints cooking, splitting firewood, refinishing floors, waiting tables and tending bar, I hesitantly embraced my fate as a writer, a field that allows me to explore, to learn, to teach, and to pretend as if perhaps I am finally figuring it out. In the winters I wander, often returning to Florence, Italy, for a month or three. The initial result is my novel “Testimony of the Senses,” a billet-doux to the arts and an exploration of how we craft identity and justify faith.
Cory remembers Thanasi: On a visit to Boulder after graduation, I stopped in to see Thanasi and to share with him impressions of my first trip to Europe. At some point I casually mentioned that I had been jazzed by the musicality of a Stuart Davis painting hung in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. Thanasi was incensed that I had wasted my time on something which could be found in America, instead of communing longer with Titian and Tintoretto in Venetian churches. It was a valid argument, and I found myself apologizing. The next time I went to Venice, I did not go near the Guggenheim, lest he somehow find out.
Lucky Vidmar
I left CU in 1997 with two computer science degrees and the full Herbst experience. I then spent several wonderful years on a U.S. Geological Survey team developing new technical ways to respond to earthquakes and tsunamis. Fulfilling my mom’s prediction that engineering is not the optimal career for me, I ended up going to law school, graduating in 2004. Today, I represent high-tech and engineering companies as a partner in the Denver law office of Hogan Lovells. I also serve as the Honorary Consul of Slovenia in Denver, helping promote closer ties between Colorado and Slovenia. These days, in my spare time, I am involved in something different altogether: running for the CU Board of Regents. I did not predict that my career would span engineering, law, diplomacy, and politics. But I credit Herbst for it all.
Lucky remembers Thanasi: I had dinner with a business contact recently. We were talking about what a true engineering education should be, and I told him about my time at Herbst and about Thanasi. Once, at the end of a spring semester, Thanasi told me how he planned to spend the summer sitting under the tree at his place in Florence, and reading Plato in Greek. It was nice to reminisce ... and then, the next morning, I learned he was gone.