Whether it’s in Hollywood, the world of medicine, or the corridors of power in Washington, D.C., alumni show how talent, energy, and their UMUC degrees bear on their career changes.
			Putting the "Troop" in the Troupes
			Facing a New Frontier in Medicine
			Taking Washington, D.C.'s Inside Track

If a retired Marine captain with three Purple Hearts and 31 Vietnam combat missions under his belt tells you it’s tough out here in Tinsel Town ... you take notice. But if anyone can survive the jungles of Hollywood, it’s Dale Dye ’81.

Widely regarded as the top military consultant to the entertainment industry, Dye packs an arsenal of Hollywood credits that includes Oliver Stone’s Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July, and JFK and Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan.

Dye landed in Hollywood after retiring from the Marines in 1984. After a detour in Central America, where he trained guerrilla troops and wrote for Soldier of Fortune, he headed for the bright lights. "I wasn’t reaching the audience I wanted to reach. I was preaching to the choir," says the self-described "professional military man by birth," who had already ruled out obvious second career choices like police work and a Pentagon desk job.

A long-time movie fan, he realized all military movies had one thing in common: They ticked him off. "They upset me . . . because they’re wrong," he said. "They misperceive the professional military man . . . the real public servants who are willing to lay their life on the line. They get short shrift in Hollywood."

Getting Hollywood to listen wasn’t easy. Dye’s break came after he read a small piece in Variety about "a heretofore unknown director doing the definitive Vietnam film based on his own experiences." Dye found that director, Oliver Stone, the Hollywood way: by making the rounds and buying lunches and drinks for people who knew Stone. "I got one writer drunk as a skunk and he scrawled Stone’s home number on a matchbook." Dye called Stone the next day to tell him, "I think you need me."

After Platoon’s success, including four Academy Awards, "Suddenly Dale Dye was the hot product if you were doing a military movie and if you wanted very emotional, very effective, very accurate," he says.

Unlike Hollywood’s military technical advisors of old, who were "allowed to sit in a chair and go to sleep" until somebody wanted to know "what side the ribbons go on," Dye uses an in-your-face, boot camp approach with actors before filming. Borrowing "the same methods that have succeeded for the Corps," Dye says he relies on "a certain psychological bent, a certain way of opening a guy’s chest cavity and grabbing his throbbing heart and talking to him that way. I’m physical and psychological . . . to knock down psychological barriers. Once you get them [actors] naked and trembling, then you can begin to work. . . . No actor can portray a soldier without having a soldier’s experience to some degree."

Dye knows just when the actors get it right, like Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan. "I’ve been there in that exhausted zombie-like state. He captured it," says Dye.

Dye runs his company, Warriors, Inc., "like it’s a rifle company. I’m fighting a constant war with skirmishes" here and there. But Dye’s intensity is not all fire. He sees the "great absurdity and humor" in life and in war and peppers his speech with jokes, often self-effacing ones. In fact, the combat veteran calls humor "the sharpest tool in my drawer."

Another stereotype buster: As a UMUC student in Asia, the combat veteran wanted a "soft major, English." While other servicemembers pursued public administration and computer science, Dye struck a deal with instructor George Sidney. If Dye finished the book he was working on, Sidney would make sure Dye got the humanities courses he wanted. Dye finished Run Between the Raindrops — his attempt to exorcise some of his Vietnam demons — and Sidney made good on his promise to get Dye those courses he needed. Sidney even sent the book to his agent, and Avon first published the book.

In Okinawa Dye taught several courses for UMUC. Saying he likes to "spread around what I’ve learned," Dye recalls what he experienced taking night classes while on active duty: "A whole world opened up to me."

Readily acknowledging he’s always been something of a rebel, he praises the Marine Corps’ tolerance for mavericks. For someone originally seeking a place in the U.S. Naval Academy, he says he hit pay dirt in the Marines: "The Corps always had a certain tolerance for colorful characters."

What’s next for this actor (with 40 film credits) and author of five books? The HBO series Band of Brothers. And on his wish list: "It’s time to do a terrific Korea film, and I want to do Beirut. I want to do my own story about Beirut, called Outrage."  

Imagine taking a seed out of an apple without cutting the apple open…

When HMOs interfered with his practice, neurosurgeon Jack Kushner '90, shown on his sailboat Suddenly 60, changed tack and entered the business world.

That’s Jack Kushner ’90, a top medical technology consultant, explaining how technology has transformed brain surgery. "The treatment of everything I learned to do has changed because of technology," says Kushner, who was a neurosurgical resident in 1968. He describes stents, which are now used to keep arteries open: They’ve replaced invasive surgery and can even be inserted while a patient is awake. He names all sorts of "replacement parts" from the ankles on up, so that we now have "bionic people."

While technology was working its magic in medicine, managed care companies were wreaking havoc in Kushner’s career in neurosurgery at Anne Arundel Medical Center in Annapolis, Maryland. Kushner, who had "always wanted to be a doctor . . . and thought nothing would happen to make me change my mind," found himself at a crossroads after 30 years in surgery. "In my worst nightmares, I never thought we’d have this situation," he says. He decided to change course and wrote about his exodus from surgery in 1995 in Preparing to Tack: When Physicians Change Careers, now out of print.

He offers a typical HMO scenario: After deciding that a patient who’s bleeding in the brain would be better off at another facility, Kushner calls the insurance company to make his case to "some secretary" and finally gets a confirmation number authorizing the transfer. He travels by helicopter with the patient to the new facility, runs more tests, and decides to operate. After six to eight hours of surgery, it’s clear the patient will make it. Happy ending? Not when Kushner sends a bill to the insurance company that gets kicked back "denied payment."

When he calls to find out why, he’s told, "You don’t have a confirmation number." "But I have it," he explains, rattling off the number. "You got permission to transfer," comes the reply. "You didn’t get permission to do surgery. You didn’t call us back."

Kushner’s career change began in 1987, when he enrolled in UMUC’s Graduate School. "I really didn’t know where I was going and where all this would end up," he says. He just knew he wasn’t happy and going back to school meant "being in control."

In his mid-forties, Kushner found himself starting over in the classroom. "At 47, it’s not so easy to go back to school and take tests and learn the computer and learn accounting when you never had accounting to begin with," he says. In a cost accounting class of five students, he says he was the only one who wasn’t a CPA.

He took his beeper and cell phone to class and sometimes had to duck out to take care of a patient. "I’d go to the emergency room and come back and hope I didn’t miss much."

Kushner’s start-up business ventures since earning his M.G.A. in 1990 have included a medical transcription company, a company to teach doctors how to switch careers and start a business, and a company to teach doctors surgery using virtual reality surgical simulators — all companies he has since sold.

On the horizon: helping two companies with marketing, distributing, and funding for medical software products. He also reviews requests, mainly for telemedicine technology and AIDS treatment, for the Paris Club, which offers loans to developing countries.

He is one of 10 members on the American College of Surgeons’ Committee of Technology and Education, which must approve all procedures involving new technology before they’ll be recognized by insurance companies. The only member who’s not a professor or the head of a department, he is, in fact, the only one not actively practicing surgery.

His most rewarding time as a surgeon came as a combat surgeon in Vietnam, he says. "I enjoyed medicine and surgery more there than anywhere. I was doing something necessary, the patient appreciated it, and there wasn’t all the harassment you get in civilian medicine. You didn’t have to worry about payment, . . . insurance, and . . . malpractice. People were honestly injured and they needed my help."

When he’s not traveling the world on assignment, Kushner can be found changing tack on his latest sailboat, Suddenly 60 — recently acquired after he sold his third, Forever 50. Those names he owes to a family friend, author Judith Viorst. His first boat, L5S1, named for a bone in the back common to slipped discs, paid homage to his patients. "I did a lot of slipped discs" as a surgeon, he says.

Taking Washington, D.C.'s Inside Track  Top

When several hundred teenagers show up on her doorstep, Ginger King '80 takes it in stride ....

After all, it’s not her dream house that’s being assaulted, but her home away from home, the Georgetown University Conference Center. And as dean of students and instructors for Presidential Classroom — a civic education program that gives high school students a weeklong insider’s look at Washington, D.C. — she gets to lay down the law.

What’s in: strict curfew and dress code (business attire only for those meetings on Capitol Hill). What’s out: alcohol, drugs, smoking, coed hotel room visits — "not even for three seconds." She adds, "And there are no second chances."

King joined Presidential Classroom five years ago after taking early retirement from the federal government, where her 32-year career ran the gamut from the Department of Defense to Commerce to State to Interior to Energy. After spending her last 13 years as director of education and information for civilian and radioactive waste management at Energy, she expected to continue working on nuclear waste management issues. She even took on some consulting work in the field. But a week after retiring, she got an unexpected offer from Presidential Classroom.

Several months earlier, she had mentioned to the group’s executive director that she wanted to stay involved with Presidential Classroom after retiring. She had spent a week each year for several years as a volunteer instructor and thought she’d increase her volunteer time. Instead she was offered a full-time, permanent (not to mention paid) position.

She quickly decided that "it would be a lot more rewarding to develop a sense of responsibility among young people. . . . It’s more evident . . . than other contributions you can make."

Besides laying down the rules, she helps develop the curriculum, recruits and trains close to 100 volunteer instructors, and teams up for a quick Plan B when, say, a speaker must cancel. "We have to find someone. We can’t let the students down," she says. What helps: the reputation of the Alexandria, Virginia–based program, begun in 1968, whose alumni include Texas Representative Chet Edwards and New Jersey Senator Robert Torricelli. It’s not unusual for people like U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno to spend time with students, she says.

Less than 12 hours after President Bill Clinton’s final State of the Union address in January 2000, 300-plus awe-struck students were on the floor of the House for their Friday seminar. Watching "that light go on" is King’s reward. "It tickles me to get paid for something that’s so much fun," she says. "I’ve been told by many people that I have the best job in Washington."

Although King found her government career progressing "very, very quickly without a degree," when she turned 30 she realized the importance of having that formal education. She enrolled in Northern Virginia Community College but soon "heard about the great program UMUC had and switched." Education is "a very important part of an individual’s life. Just because it was years ago doesn’t mean it’s not important," she says. "It’s not just the degree that’s on the wall. . . . It’s the people . . . the interactions, the rewards."

King earned her degree in 4 H years while holding down a full-time job and traveling extensively — not to mention selling real estate on the side. "I’ve always liked doing lots of things, instead of doing one thing," she said.

After a 32-year career in the federal government, Ginger King '80 now introduces high school students to the inner workings of Washington, D.C.

A self-described "houseaholic," whose father was a builder, she always wanted to be an architect but "in those days, girls didn’t go into certain careers." During childhood, she played with house plans, and when she inherited her childhood house — a brick rambler her father built in 1959 in Vienna, Virginia — she went to work. "I redesigned it . . . down to every light switch. People often ask, ‘Who was your architect?’

We went up and out and added a whole second floor, yet some of the rooms I’ve left the same," she says, describing the house as "a combination of my memories and my dreams. . . . I turned it into my dream house."

Sometimes, she says, while she sits in a rocking chair on the porch watching the afternoon sun, "I think, ‘Daddy would love this.’ He used to encourage me to draw plans. He’d probably say, ‘Ginger, you should have been a builder.’ "

Plus she’s got a talent that most teens only dream of. According to Presidential Classroom coworker Amanda Marx, "Ginger can talk her way into and out of every situation beautifully."