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>>>In a February appearance at an investor conference hosted by Goldman Sachs, for example, he mentioned that he had worked at a paper mill in Alabama and an al

• smackfu 14y ago
  Heh, this is actually a predictable path. He has a BS in industrial engineering, and typically that means you do work in plants in the middle of nowhere where labor is cheap.
  • didgeoridoo 14y ago
    Ah I suppose I'm guilty of romanticizing it a bit -- I rather imagined him to be working on an assembly line.
    • smackfu 14y ago
      Well, it is true that it is more of a blue collar job than many others, even if you are in management or doing engineering work on the line. I had a friend who worked at a paper products factory in rural Pennsylvania as an IE as his first job out of school, and he didn't care for it. The kind of area where everyone young just wants to leave, and you are coming in as a 21 year old. Not fun. And I particularly remember he had to buy a 4WD Jeep because the plant was always open but they didn't do a good job plowing roads.
  • mturmon 14y ago
    From wiki: "Cook [was born in 1960 and] grew up in Robertsdale, Alabama, near Mobile. His father was a shipyard worker, while his mother was a homemaker. Cook graduated from high school at Robertsdale High School, earned a B.S. degree in industrial engineering from Auburn University in 1982, and his M.B.A. from Duke University's Fuqua School of Business in 1988." His family might have been blue-collar, but you seem to be right in that after graduation in 1982 he would have been 22, and presumably taken a regular white-collar job and later entered business school. Pretty standard trajectory.