1968 – 1972

The Persistent First Memories of RPI

by David Stuart Halwig

My first memories of RPI have kept refreshing as I moved through my on-campus experiences through my career and through various opportunities to give back, continue to learn and grow. My journey to Troy started on a small humanities-focused private school in New England. Kind of an anomalous science and math stand-out, my physics teacher, mentor and RPI graduate Ted Hersey convinced me to look at RPI for college. I went all-in with Early Decision and arrived on campus in September of 1968. My earliest memory was having lunch with my father in the freshman dining hall, being invited to join a distinguished looking, eminently approachable man sitting by himself who turned out to be one Dr Feigenbaum, professor emeritus of chemistry and a highly accomplished scientist. After an hour of engaging discussion, I knew at that I was sitting with the “real deal.” I knew also that I had made the right choice in colleges and career direction. The ensuing four years were a swirl of scientific epiphanies, enduring friendships, varsity swimming, personal growth, self-discovery and some brutal winter storms. I’ve often thought that the RPI winters gave me a life-long faith that spring will eventually come. The richness of the RPI curriculum helped me discover that I was intensely curious and creative. Somewhere among the myriad facts and formulas, I was being taught how to develop individual thinking skills I bundled all that up with my degree in Management Engineering to navigate a very successful career as a consulting partner with KPMG. After retiring, my curiosity, thirst for discovery, and creativity engines engendered in Troy lit the fire to start a consulting company of my own, specializing in helping successful companies see their way through inflection point to their next tranche of growth. My first memories were also renewed throughout my life journey through a series of recursive experiences which allowed me to bring what I had learned beyond Troy, back to Troy. I was privileged to become engaged in the perpetual RPI through service on the Key Executive Board with a bunch of very accomplished senior alums and patrons, supporting the Archer Center from its naissance to its current position as a true differentiator for today’s Rensselaer experience, leading classes of PhD student in Acher leadership development programs, being a judge on the Lemelson Prize with a Nobel laureate, working with the academic deans and other top RPI leaders to craft Challenge Studio and position it in the funding queue to be an exciting innovation in multi-disciplinary experiential learning. But this is not about me. It is about me, prepared by RPI with the tools to establish conditions for success. And the ability to call on these to help RPI, continue to learn new points of view, and recursively further enrich my life’s journey. In this sense, my “first memories” of my RPI experience are a kind of episodic continuum, persistently renewed as I draw on so many of the qualities the Rensselaer Experience armed me with for life.