Alan Hurwitz – 50th Reunion Essay

Alan Hurwitz

720 Station Road

Amherst, MA 01002

ahalink@comcast.net

413-687-1648

Education: University of Massachusetts Center for International Education, Ed. D., 1981

Career: Organization Development consulting for many types of organizations: NGO’ s business, government, and international organizations in many countries. Began working for the War on Poverty’ s Community Action Program in Chelsea and Revere MA

Avocations: Photography, Tennis, Playing Dixieland Piano

College: Pierson

About twenty years ago, I was a participant in a life-planning workshop. We were asked to introduce ourselves by describing our lives in one sentence. After very little deliberation I came up with, “My life is an ongoing tension between Yale and Winthrop, Massachusetts, with Winthrop gradually pulling ahead as the years go by.”

Attempt at humor that this may have been, it accurately described an important aspect of who I was then, and perhaps have remained.

Yale Experience

Like many of my classmates, I was a part of Inky Clark’s new wave—very grateful, but quite unprepared to take advantage of my Yale opportunity. I believe also that Yale was painfully unprepared to deal with me, and perhaps others of my background. To make things worse, for a while I had trouble believing I really was at Yale, and afraid that Yale would eventually discover its error. I came to understand that many classmates shared similar feelings.

That “imposter” experience prepared me well for my career. Having gotten through Yale pretty well, the dread of being “discovered”, that I sometimes experienced later in my consulting had been pretty much neutralized, thanks in part to my Yale experience.

Graduation and Beyond

Despite many lunch and dinner conversations at Pierson about the exact form of our predestined future world leadership, I had no idea what I wanted to do after Yale—immediately, or later on when we assumed our rightful place among the shakers and movers.

There was of course Vietnam to consider, limiting choices considerably. My nightmares and political doubts were more than enough to cause me to seek a plan that would keep me out of the war.

A year in a volunteer program in Israel solved that issue temporarily and built on my Youth Director job on a cruise ship, and time in Colombia and Venezuela, to inspire a very international sense of the world and myself. This became central to my professional and personal identity.

A younger person who wanted to do something similar once asked me, “What does one need to be an organizational development consultant?” I answered, “A client who will pay you to help.” I did earn a somewhat relevant Ed. D. on the way, but that answer remains the real truth.

I was fortunate to find many of those clients over the years. They eventually included many international organizations, several foreign governments, and businesses—in forty-six countries, forty-seven with the US.

Despite the unorthodox nature of my career path, and the uncertainty I experienced during my exploration, things have worked out pretty well. I’ve made a reasonable living and enjoy my semi-rural home in Amherst, had interesting and often impactful professional experiences around the world, and perhaps most important, avoided a regular job, which never fit my mental or emotional metabolism.

On the personal side, after years of battling a severe case of commitment-phobia, at age forty-one I met a woman with whom I wanted to be WITH, in the full sense of the word. We even got “M’d” only twelve years later. That relationship ended, suddenly and unexpectedly for me, after twenty-six years, shortly before our last reunion—a blow from which I’ m still recovering, though moving on with my life, as best I can.