"see opportunity." UK Experience Helps Alum Explore the World

Coming from a small town and a small school, D.C. Storm was sure he didn't want to attend a big college like the University of Kentucky  ... that is, until he made a campus visit.

When he arrived, Storm says he saw a "plethora of opportunities to get involved on campus. There is a niche for everyone. You just have to go find it."

Storm did, joining a fraternity, Student Government and the Student Development Council, which focuses on fund-raising, and other organizations. The diversity of opportunities and people he met convinced him that he could conquer bigger worlds and embrace different experiences.

Today, Storm is a vice president of financial planning at NBC Universal in New York City. The exciting position follows a position with GE Healthcare in financial management, where he traveled abroad for the first time to places like Greece, London, Paris and Spain.

"For a small-town boy who had never been out of the country, I got to see the world via GE. And I got to work for GE because of the University of Kentucky," Storm says.

Storm, a double major in accounting and finance, says his professors at the Gatton College of Business and Economics made the subject matter he was studying more than an academic exercise. They made the often arcane financial topics come to life with real-world examples.

"The professors at UK . . . were second to none," he says. "These were people who had been out in the workforce that know this skill and can apply to a real-world example."

Those lessons are ones he applies to this day at his job at NBC. "That training," he says, "is what allowed me to be successful in my field and continue down the career path that I have been."

Storm says taking on big challenges at work stemmed from his willingness to explore a bigger community at UK and realize that he could find his own niche and develop his own interests.

"I heard a very good quote about UK from someone recently that it's as small as you want to make it," Storm says. "It's a microcosm of the real world. It's a large campus. It's a diverse campus. But the world is large and the world is diverse. It exposed me to so many different types of people, situations, that when it came time to go out and work in the real world … I was ready."

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