Fall 2001

          A generous gift from Ted G. Roden (B.S.Ch.E. '42) of Odessa will help the College vigorously pursue the goal of producing entrepreneurially equipped graduates.

          A key focus of Roden's gift is the early recruitment and retention of high-aptitude future engineers with outstanding leadership potential through the Roden Engineering Leadership Program. A total of 40 high school students will be identified for financial support for four years of engineering studies at UT. Through an array of carefully-tailored seminars and mentorships, they'll gain the fast-track access to scores of top corporate leaders that will prove invaluable to their future entrepreneurial careers. They'll emerge familiar, as well, with non-technical subject areas vital to success in the business world.

          "How many times do kids go to school, but don't get a background on how to run their own business if they want to?" he says. "If you have a course in business law, elementary accounting, a little economics and so forth, you've got a background that you can always fall back on."

          Roden's gift complements the Clint Murchison Chair of Free Enterprise established in 1976 to foster the teaching and practice of free enterprise throughout the world. To its original globally-oriented mission has now been added a more localized one: the creation of a campus-wide culture of entrepreneurship at the individual level, among the entire UT engineering community. "That's a tall order, but it's our vision," says Dr. Steve Nichols (B.S.M.E. '72, M.S.M.E. '73, Ph.D. '75) who took the chair's helm in the new position of faculty fellow on September 1.

          The vision mandates that graduates combine superb technical expertise with the non-technical skills of imagination and flexibility. It applies the qualities of creativity, innovation and leadership to the development and commercialization of future technologies at The University. It is enriched by ties to other free enterprise-related UT entities such as The McCombs School of Business, the College of Natural Sciences, and the Law School. Ted Roden, like the five Texas Engineering Exes profiled here, started out an engineer and became an entrepreneur through a mixture of the planned-for and the unanticipated. During World War II, he put his chemical engineering knowledge to use in service of his country when he was drafted out of college to serve on the top-secret Manhattan Project. Later he joined his brother's prosperous West Texas package-store business as supervisor of the company's construction efforts and store expansion. When a chance came to acquire a major brewery's distributorship, he branched out, with great success, on his own.

          Although he eventually left engineering for the sales/marketing side of the beverage industry, he's never lost touch with his technical roots.

          "Dr. Taylor never failed to remind us that he was teaching us how to solve problems, not to memorize things," he says. "When I look at a sales curve I'm preparing for my business, I see calculus problems. All that math taught me how to think, and think fast. Therein, to me, lies the whole secret."