Alumni Magazine - Summer 2008 - (Page 20) Beau Cleland Army Team Player Alfredo Aponte Bringing the Modern-day Salon to the South Cleland says. “I got hurt in practice and missed a lot of my senior season, which was pretty disappointing.” During that last year at Tech, Cleland began applying to law schools. “My twin brother and I started discussing what we really wanted to do with life after college. Neither of us could really see ourselves settling into some lame corporate desk jobs and we’d always been interested in the military. So we checked around and the Army had a program for college grads who hadn’t done ROTC where you could apply to attend officer candidate school. “I was a lineman at Tech so after my last game I went on a diet, lost 60 pounds, interviewed, was accepted and by August I was heading to basic training,” Cleland says. Cleland is unsure whether he will ever pursue a corporate desk job. “As for law or grad school, I haven’t really made up my mind yet,” he says. “I’ve been sort of preoccupied with what’s going on over here.” — KLW B eau Cleland is nearing the halfway mark in a 15-month tour in Iraq as an Army field artillery captain in the 10th Mountain Division. “For this deployment I was assigned to a military transition team, which is an advisory team attached to an Iraqi army unit,” says Cleland, HTS 03. “I’ve held just about every advisory position at some point so far, from logistics to operations and tactics and now as the acting team leader and adviser to an Iraqi battalion commander who leads about 750 men.” In April, Cleland and the team relocated from Baghdad to Sadr City, “where things have been less than peaceful,” says the 27-year-old, who previously served a tour of duty in Afghanistan. A President’s Scholar at Tech, Cleland was a walk-on football player who worked his way up to the travel squad during his junior year. He convinced coach Chan Gailey to award him a scholarship for his senior year. “I lettered twice but was never a starter,” I n mid-April, a standing-roomonly crowd of academics, artists and hipsters packed Octane, a coffee bar just a few blocks from the Georgia Tech campus. They weren’t there to hear an acoustic set from a local band or to participate in open mike night. They had gathered for a Sunday evening slide show. Alfredo Aponte, ID 07, a designer with Echo Visualization, is an organizer and cocurator of Pecha Kucha Atlanta. Like a show-and-tell for grownups, the event allows everyone from architects to hairdressers to step up to the mike and discuss their professions, projects or passions. A strict format keeps each PowerPoint presentation from becoming a bore: A presenter may discuss 20 slides at 20 seconds apiece for a succinct six minutes and 40 seconds of stage time. Pecha Kucha, which now takes place in more than 120 cities across the globe, first hit the scene in 2003 in Tokyo. Created by Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein of Klein Dytham Architecture, it began as a way for architects and designers to network and discuss their projects. It takes its name (pronounced peh-chak-cha) from a Japanese term for the sound of conversation. The Pecha Kucha concept arrived in Atlanta courtesy of Georgia Tech associate professor of architecture Mark Cottle. Upon returning from a trip to Japan, where he participated in the original Pecha Kucha, Cottle enlisted the help of fellow architecture associate professor Sabir Khan, who had once collaborated on another project 20 Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine • Summer 2008
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