“If you want to get ahead in the business world, you need to be on chapter two while everyone else is on chapter one.”

Mike Stone (BS Chemical Engineering ’63) got that advice from a boss early in his career. It proved so valuable that he’s made it his mission to share it with current UT engineering students.

Stone, now 84 and enjoying his retirement in Lake Tahoe, has funded the John W. Prados Chemical Engineering Co-op Scholarships, the Pathways to Success class, the annual co-op awards banquet, the Co-op Leadership Program, and graduation medallions for all co-op students.

For his extraordinary career and his Volunteer spirit of giving back, Stone is a 2024 inductee to the  Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering’s (CBE) Hall of Fame.

History of Hard Work

As a young man, Stone worked long days each summer on his family’s farm. He earned $5 a day and saved every penny to pay for college.

Inspired by his twin cousins who worked co-op jobs at Union Carbide while studying chemical engineering at Georgia Tech, Stone was eager to participate in a co-op experience when he got to UT. He knew it would help him pay for college and, at the same time, provide valuable on-the-job training.

During his five years at UT, Stone alternated quarters taking classes and working at Monsanto. By the time he graduated, he had nearly two years of work experience under his belt, and had spent time in the engineering, production, and research and development departments of Monsanto.

“I knew what it was going to be like in the industrial world because of the co-op experience,” he said.

Over the course of his career, Stone worked at Allied Chemical, Copolymer Rubber and Chemical, and Kaiser Aluminum and Chemical. In his last assignment, at GS Roofing Products, he was the vice president responsible for corporate development, corporate engineering, research and development, environment, safety, quality control, and transportation and distribution.

Considering His Career

After retiring at age 58, Stone wanted to find a way to give back.

“I began thinking about my career, and I realized how lucky I was that two events happened to me,” he said.

Drawing on the advice he’d been given “stay a chapter ahead of others,” he had enrolled in a two-year business correspondence course after realizing he needed a greater understanding of business to move into a managerial role.

A few years later, while preparing to take the professional engineering exam, he was exposed to engineering economics. He quickly recognized this, too, was a topic he needed to know more about if he intended to climb the corporate ladder.

“Things might not have turned out as well as they did, had I not learned those two things,” he said.

Embodying the Volunteer Spirit of Giving Back

Over several years, Stone worked with the college’s development office to devise a multi-faceted approach to encourage engineering students to gain critical business, financial, and leadership skills.

He established the Prados Scholarship—named for former vice president and university professor emeritus John Prados—that provides one-year, $5,000 awards to up to five chemical engineering students each year. To qualify, students must participate in the Engineering Professional Practice co-op program and take some specific business courses. They also must read “Exceed Your Expectations Through Lifelong Learning,” a booklet Stone penned based on his own career success.

He established the co-op leadership program that offers a free selection of leadership books to co-op students. And he funded the establishment of a one-hour credit “Pathways for Success for Engineers” course that focuses on lifelong learning, leadership, financial strategies for the first 10 years of a graduate’s career, and the importance of giving back. The course also allows the students to hear directly, via recorded interviews, from several successful Tickle College of Engineering alumni, including himself, John Tickle, Eric Zeanah, Misty Mayes, and several others.

“Young engineering graduates have much more potential than they realize,” Stone said. “But the key to achieving that potential is the continual acquisition of knowledge.”