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Business alumnus creates scholarship for first-generation, 'B' students
Van Chesnutt at the Temple of Hatshepsutin in Egypt

Business alumnus creates scholarship for first-generation, 'B' students

July 20, 2019 at 3:05pm

By Karen-Janine Cohen

R. Van Chesnutt believes in giving back and has chosen FIU for a generous six-figure bequest. The successful FIU Business alumnus has created a scholarship with a twist: it’s focused not on those top grade point earners, but on first-generation, “B” average business students.

The Chesnutt Scholarship, funded through a bequest in the donor’s will to the FIU Foundation, will provide support for undergraduate business students who have a GPA between 2.45 and 3.8 and are among the first generation in their families to attend college. It is designed to “assist and encourage retention of ‘B’ students, those who would not be perceived by the donor as too serious or as afraid to question authority."

That’s exactly the kind of student Van Chesnutt says he was.

Chesnutt, who graduated with a BBA in 1978, attended FIU at night while working during the day as a production planner at American Hospital Supply Corp.

“It takes a lot longer to get your degree that way,” he said. “I wasn’t an 'A' student because I was working full time.”

Not long after graduating, Chesnutt answered an ad in the Miami Herald for The Boeing Company. They were seeking estimators. He got the job and ended up moving to Seattle. He spent 20 years with Boeing before leaving and founding his own company, Means to An End, an information technology systems consulting firm. While at Boeing, he also founded Tirraappendi Inc., the licensor of security technology he invented and patented.

Chesnutt was born and raised in Miami, and several family members worked in aviation. He found it serendipitous that he should end up at Boeing, an aviation and aerospace company. As is often the case with careers, things do not turn out as we might desire; Chesnutt dreamed of being an architect, but decided that pursuing a business degree was the more practical path.

At the time Chesnutt was attending FIU, all business students were required to learn a computer language—Cobal, Fortran or Basic. Chesnutt chose Basic.

“It turned out that the computing experience I received at FIU helped me a great deal when I started working for Boeing.” Boeing, he said, “inadvertently discovered I knew something about computers, and that set me off on a completely different path, one that I had never conceived of or envisioned. I became a database and application architect.”

FIU classes gave Chesnutt another boost at Boeing. His business classes used real-life Boeing examples and processes, including estimation problems and studying the aviation firm’s organizational structure.

After leaving Boeing, Chesnutt, working as a consultant, helped to set up a complex medical database used in analyzing regional cancer diagnoses and outcomes for a  Seattle cancer research center. As a consultant, he worked for a number of companies both public and private, including returning to Boeing as a contractor.

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