'You're talking about our creed:
Don’t just do it, become a part of it'

Sam Deutsch wanted an Ivy League undergraduate education for his “foundation.”

“I decided to use my graduate school experience to focus on what I wanted to do as a career,” says Sam, a Brown University graduate.

For that career, as a chemical engineer, he chose South Carolina. He was sold on, among other things, his previous experience at the University through a summerlong NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates in 2000, and the opportunity to participate in Carolina's prestigious African American Professors Program.

“I looked around and I realized, well, people really didn't treat me the same way as I was treated at Carolina, and I liked that,” he says of shopping for graduate schools. He enrolled at Carolina in 2001 and graduated in summer 2006.

“The opportunities that I would have at the University of South Carolina would be more important than just being a name and number somewhere else like at Stanford or Northwestern. I think that was the draw and I was very fortunate to be able to have that vision and see, because I've had had those opportunities and they've been very good to me.”

Sam helped recruit other students to the Department of Chemical Engineering. He ticks off the selling points for prospective students that had previously won him over: “the opportunity to do research in an environment where I'll be respected by my professors, the opportunity to run a graduate student organization, the opportunity to do research overseas, the opportunity to have industrial contacts during my research ... and the list goes on and on.”

Sam has served as president of the chemical engineering student organization, sat on the search committee for a new dean of the engineering college, and spent a research semester in Japan. He also found time to be a husband—he and his wife, Tabetha Pate, a biology major, host graduate-undergraduate cookouts for friends—and to participate in student and community activities.

“You're a full-time researcher and also a full-time student, and a lot of people see themselves only as that,” he acknowledges. “My philosophy is a lot different, especially coming from a place like Brown, where they encourage you to go above and beyond and to do extracurricular things because it's interesting, not because it's the reward or respect for doing it. It's the right thing to do.”

The University's commitment to research, particularly hydrogen fuel cells, and the environment, including the state-of-the-art West Quad living-learning community, impresses Sam. “One of our senators said South Carolina will be to Future Fuels™ what Detroit was to the combustible engine. I think that is due in large part to the engineering college at USC.”

As for plans for a live-learn-work-play riverfront district that will include the research-centered Innovista, Sam is sold on the idea. “I think the residence and commercial district, also the innovation ... those are all the things that come together to make a perfect mix.

“It sounds like something where, if we were both still at the University (in the future), we'd probably want to get involved with it. Because it sounds like you're talking about our creed, you know: ‘Don't just do it, become a part of it.’