After Bill Shutkin '87 broke up with his high-school girlfriend during his junior year at Brown, he enrolled in a tap-dancing class.
He fell in love with the woman teaching the class, a sophomore fiction writer. "She totally rocked my world and completely unsettled me," he said. But in unnerving him, she expanded his horizons and opened his eyes, he said.
That experience characterizes his time at Brown, Shutkin said in the keynote address of the Career Development Center's "Career Week" on Saturday. Shutkin told a nearly full Andrews Dining Hall that he arrived at the University clueless. "I had no sense, not only of who I was, but also of my place in the world." Growing up in odd, uninspiring 1960s and '70s suburban Connecticut, Shutkin "longed for a sense of inspiration and vision," he said.
Brown woke him up from his "deluded and soporific state," he said. "In unsettling me, it involved me. It was an unfolding. That was the power of Brown for me then."
Shutkin returned to the source of his inspiration to deliver the opening remarks of the Career Conference Roundtable, Saturday's all-afternoon event, which brought students and alums together to discuss career paths.
Shutkin joked that though he was competing for an audience with a speech given by Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., at Rhode Island College, "I'd like to think Barack would have attended the career fair."
Shutkin is currently a partner of the Innovation Network for Communities, a national nonprofit that works in the areas of economic development, energy, land use and transportation.
He is also the interim executive director and trustee of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, a network of sustainable businesses, according to the CDC's Web site.
Shutkin has written several books and taught at Boston College Law School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This summer, he will become the first director of a new interdisciplinary program in sustainable development and growth at the Leeds School of Business at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Shutkin's professional career has been characterized by a sense of "non-linearity." He often worked on many things - pursuing his masters in history, working toward his law degree, authoring a book, working for a social justice group - all at once.
"It was Brown that set this career of many hats in motion," he said. "I think, looking back, that Brown was the perfect breeding ground for these new opportunities."
Opportunities to improve the world abound in the fields of environmental issues, economic development and social justice, which have recently come together in an "unprecedented" manner, Shutkin said.
"The ecological mandate that everything is connected is starting to play out," he told The Herald. "Opportunities are there in ways they never have been."
Shutkin said he views Brown students as "99 percent more qualified" than their peers to take on the new world of social entrepreneurship, since the University demands its students think creatively and independently.
"It's the iconoclastic culture," he said. "It's the New Curriculum. You create your own boundaries with a healthy respect to tradition."
He also touched on Brown's ability to combine the classroom and the community. "Learning and doing need to happen simultaneously," he said.
Brown is also an opportunity to "let yourself grow into yourself," he told The Herald. There will be pain, uncertainty and hardship, he said in his speech, but "deep breaths, patience and perspective are great gifts and qualities."
Shutkin said his career of sustainability has been about "creative destruction," about positively transforming the human condition and moving it to a better, more sustainable place.
The path he is on now is something that would have been "unimaginable" when he graduated from Brown 20 years ago, he said.
"It's not just new careers, but a new mental mindset," he said.
He urged students to become comfortable with dynamism and realize that, sometimes, a troubling direction is not as despairing as it seems.
"A great piece of wisdom is to have perspective," he said.
Shutkin said he noticed in the Career Week pamphlet a category of career paths listed as "non-traditional."
"Non-traditional?" he asked. "Is there anything else at Brown?"
