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Outstanding Young Texas Ex Awards light up UT Alumni Center
An easy way to deflate your ego? Attend the Outstanding Young Texas Ex Awards. Each year since 1980, the Texas Exes group has lionized four alumni who have already made significant marks on society before their 40th birthdays.
Among the previous winners were Scott McClellan, Machree Gibson, Robert Rodriguez, Matthew McConaughey, Ron Kirk, Marcia Gay Harden, Greg Abbott, Paul Begala, Robert Schenkkan, Michael Dell, Betty Sue Flowers, Earl Campbell, Ben Crenshaw and the Statesman’s own Ben Sargent (1989).
Kim Gundersen and Randy Ramirez
This year, the winners were no less stellar, if not yet celebrities. Honored at the UT Alumni Center were, first, ad man Craig Allen, who created the viral “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign for Old Spice and “Touch the Rainbow … Taste the Rainbow” for Skittles. He’s already won an Emmy Award and a Film Grand Prix from the Cannes International Advertising Festival.
Veronica Vargas Stidvent and Daron Roberts
Daron Roberts’ story is particularly inspiring. Son of a Baptist preacher in East Texas, he served as student body president in 2000, then went to work for Sen. Joe Lieberman before earning a dual degree in law and public policy from Harvard University. Yet he gave it all up to apply his rhetorical skills to coaching football, taking an unpaid internship with the Kansas City Royals. He now assists at West Virginia University and runs a football and life skills camp for youth.
Shaarik Zafir and Craig Allen
Veronica Vargas Stidvent, whom I interviewed briefly during the 2008 presidential campaign, took her UT honors to Yale Law School, then went on to become a special assistant to President George W. Bush and Assistant Secretary of Labor. She returned to UT to head the LBJ School of Public Affairs’ Center for Politics and Governance and now teaches in the McCombs School of Business.
Shaarik Zafar’s parents emigrated from Pakistan, settling first in Ohio, then Kansas and Texas. Even as a student at UT, Zafar show sustained interest in international human rights. After UT Law School and time with a prestigious Austin law firm, he represented the Department of Justice in its initiative to combat post 9/11 discrimination. He now works in the White House, coordinating efforts to fight the recruiting of terrorists recruiting around the world.
Puts what the rest of us do in perspective, doesn’t it?
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