"DePauw Was the Perfect School for Me," TransUnion Executive VP Jan Temple '74 Tells Chicago Tribune

September 19, 2005

September 19, 2005, Greencastle, Ind. - "When Jan Temple arrived at DePauw University's campus in Greencastle, Ind., in the fall of 1970, she had her heart set on becoming a Spanish major," begins an article in today's Chicago Tribune. Temple, a 1974 graduate of DePauw, took a different path and is now executive vice president and chief marketing officer at TransUnion LLC, a privately held Chicago-based credit reporting and financial services company.

"I'd taken four years of Spanish in high school and wanted to be a Spanish interpreter at the United Nations," Temple tells the Tribune. But after a year of Spanish classes at DePauw, she decided to seek out "something more multifaceted." Ann Therese Palmer writes, "So Temple took advantage of a little-known perk at DePauw and designed her own major. 'I put together all of the subjects in which I'd always been interested -- a combination of art, photography, English, psychology, radio, TV and advertising,' says Temple, who enticed an art professor into being the adviser of her advertising-area major."

The story, which serves as an introduction to an interview with Temple, continues, "This creative thinking also helped her land her first job after graduation. 'The head of the Continental Bank's human resources department was interviewing on campus,' says Temple, whose only prior banking experience was as a teller during college summer vacations. 'At the end of the interview, she said, `You don't really want to be a banker, do you?' I admitted that I didn't, but had wanted a practice job interview. A month later, I got a call from her. `I've got the perfect job for you,' she said. `It's in corporate events.' It was a great first job because it was an entree into marketing and gave me immediate exposure to all of the top executives in the company.'"

The newspaper asks Temple -- who has worked 31 years in banking and financial-services marketing -- "Did where you went to college make a difference in your life?" She responds, "DePauw was the perfect school for me. There aren't a lot of schools that would let you make up your own major. It was one of the key experiences in my life. I have great friends that I'm as close to today as I was when I was in school."

Read the complete text at the newspaper's Web site.

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