Iowa State Spotlight

Iowa State Alumni Spotlight

DAVID SCHWICKERATH IS68

A group of Iowa State Alumni started meeting in March 2020, shortly after the COVID-19 lockdown, as a way to mitigate the isolation we all felt in our lockdown mode. We meet on Zoom every Monday at 5 pm EST in a cocktail hour type environment. Members are spread from California to Florida with only a couple guys actually living in Iowa. We invited mostly 1960’s and 1970’s Iowa State Triangles with a few 1980’s folks. The 1960 and 1970 guys were mostly retired so it was easier for them to commit to the weekly time slot. We keep it interesting by having each Alumnus tell their “Life Story” in 30-60 minutes. Twenty to thirty five brothers participate each week. We schedule the presentations a couple months into the future so guys have an ability to prepare as much as they would like. We learn about what our brothers have been doing with their business and personal lives for the last forty to fifty years. We learn about families, work, hobbies, where we’ve lived, who we’ve loved, and just generally rekindle our past friendships. We tell a lot of stories that only we know about, including some stupid stuff we did when we were twenty years old. Most of us realize that each day is a gift, that it’s important to enjoy our families and friends while we can, including our fraternity brothers, and we’re grateful for the ability to rekindle friendships from our time at Iowa State Triangle. We’ve also invited the President of Iowa State and the Dean of Engineering to speak to us as well. Our alumni have supported our recent Capital Campaign to help reduce our mortgage balance on the new house we purchased in June 2018. We’ll keep it going as long as we can keep it interesting. We record each presentation and save them to our Alumni Google Drive so we can share and access everyone’s story. We are making a second pass through our group asking our guys to show us their Corvette collection and other interesting hobbies and stories from special times in our past!