Terry Brown

I was born in Anchorage, Alaska, a month after statehood, to Jim Brown, an auditor from Aroostook County, Maine, who was working for the U.S. Army and Doris McGurn Brown, a stewardess from Brooklyn, New York, who was working for an Alaskan airline that flew out over the Aleutian Islands. While I was still an infant, our young family moved to a suburb of Los Angeles where my father continued his career as a defense contract auditor. When I was eight years old, my family moved from idyllic Southern California, with its fragrant fruit trees, backyard swimming pools and Disneyland, to Bangkok, Thailand, where we lived from 1967 to 1969 while my father worked in Saigon, Vietnam during the war. As complicated and difficult as they were, these were the two most formative years of my life. Here I learned that the world was much larger and much more diverse that my California home. I trace my love of travel, my appreciation for diverse cultures, and my commitment to international education to this experience.

We returned to an utterly changed, politically divided United States in 1969. We lived in a little town on the Thames River in Connecticut until I was in the ninth grade. I attended two wonderful schools where I learned from talented and committed teachers who taught me lessons that I still remember today. In fifth grade I assumed my first leadership role in life: I was one of the founding members of The Earth Club. There were two of us in the club and we took turns being president. Inspired by the first Earth Day in 1970, we set out to clean up our environment, going door to door to the housewives in our neighborhood to inform them of the best laundry detergents with the lowest level of phosphates. In ninth grade, we moved again and for the last time to Springfield, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC, where my parents still live today. With each move, I learned to be flexible and adaptable to new settings and challenges.

It was always expected in my family that my siblings and I would attend college. My father raised us to believe that college was the ticket to a good job and a better life, a value that motivates me every working day. He was the youngest of eighteen children and grew up on a potato farm in northern Maine. There was no expectation in his family that he would go to college, but over time, he took correspondence courses and courses at local community colleges, and eventually received his bachelor’s de