In Their Own Words: Alumni in Business

F. W. (Ted) Gerbracht, Jr. '64

After graduation, and following three years of military service, I joined the IBM Corporation, beginning a 40-year career as an information technology specialist, manager, and executive with four Fortune 500 companies.  My sociology education at Dartmouth equipped me with a base of knowledge, a set of skills, and some  tools to help me analyze and solve problems.  But the greatest impact was on my parallel life as an independent scholar and teacher, through a series of graduate programs in history, with a focus on religious cultures.  That interest was stimulated as a result of my three-year assignment in the Army, during which I was an instructor in international area studies at the Defense Information School (DINFOS), the institute for training military journalists, broadcasters, and public relations specialists and officers.

Through a series of graduate programs in Asian studies, history , and political science, I eventually completed a Ph. D. in history.  My dissertation was on the use of early medieval sermons as a lens to view the religious society of Late Antique Gaul;  I grounded my thesis on Peter Berger's 1960s works on sociology of knowledge and social reality.   So, you see, all of this traces back to my sociology major at Dartmouth.