Kevin J. Ruth (BA '82) knows a little something about time management.
The first member of his family to go to college, Ruth worked 40 to 60 hours a week to pay his way through school while taking a full slate of classes at Temple University Ambler.
"It was all about finding the right balance that worked for me. I knew I wanted to go to college, so I did what was necessary to meet that goal," said Ruth, who graduated from Temple in 1982 with a bachelor's degree in Accounting. "My parents helped where they could; they gave me a car to use, which was huge or I wouldn't have been able to work and go to school and take part in all of the other opportunities afforded to me while I was at Temple. Without my experiences at Temple Ambler, I think my life would have gone much differently — I don't know if I'd be where I am today."
Fast forward to today and Ruth has achieved decades of leadership success in the healthcare industry. At UnitedHealthcare, Ruth has worn many hats, from Chief Operating Officer to Chief Executive Officer for the Mid-Atlantic region and Senior Vice President for Enterprise Clinical Services. He is currently Senior Vice President of Health Advancement for UnitedHealthcare Medicare & Retirement.
"I was a small town kid from Warminster, PA. Temple gave me opportunities beyond anything I could have imagined," said Ruth, a member of the Temple University Ambler and School of Environmental Design Board of Visitors who would like to become a member of Temple's Board of Trustees in the future. "It has been a dream of mine to give back to Temple, but I wasn't quite sure how. It's been on my mind for a long time — I'm 54-years-old and at a good point in my life to help other students that might be in the same circumstances I was. It was time to stop talking about it and make a commitment."
Working with the Office of Development and Alumni Relations at Temple University Ambler, Ruth and his wife Georgette — who recently celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary — have established an endowed $100,000 fund that will provide scholarships for students of all majors attending Temple University Ambler for years to come. The first award will be presented during Ambler's Academic Scholarship and Awards Ceremony in April 2015.
While the scholarship is available to all students attending Temple University Ambler, preference will be given to students working full-time in addition to taking classes. Additional preference will be given to working students who are also supporting a family.
"When you talk to Kevin, you quickly understand how much he loves Temple Ambler and what the campus means to him. When he attended Temple, he was tremendously active on campus; he was a founding member and vice president of the Ambler Campus chapter of the Alpha Chi Rho fraternity," said Linda Lowe, Director of Development and Alumni Relations at Temple University Ambler. "While Kevin was a student, the fraternity lost one of their brothers — Jamie Dixon. Kevin felt the need to help the family heal by working with the fraternity to establish the Jamie Dickson Scholarship."
The scholarship was initially supported with funds raised during an annual volleyball marathon, Lowe said. When that particular annual event ended, however, "Kevin almost single-handed donated enough funds to fully endow the scholarship."
"Kevin has worked hard in his career and in his many leadership responsibilities," she said. "He is the embodiment of paying it forward."
Ruth said when he first arrived at Temple University Ambler he started out just like most of his peers, "a scared freshman."
"I remember looking around this big room and all of the other students and feeling like I was in the wrong place. I was a good student in high school but on my first college exam, I got a D — I was going to drop out," he said. "I thought about it for a long time; what else was I going to do? I decided to stay and make the absolute most of it."
Outside of the classroom, he helped form the building blocks of Alpha Chi Rho at Ambler, was a student government representative and joined the student newspaper. He also earned the nickname "Skipper" by running all of the fraternity intramural sports teams on campus. And he did all of this while holding down a full-time job at Warminster General Hospital.
"I got my 40 hours in however I could; sometimes I'd work 30 hours on a weekend. I'd take all of my classes between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m., eat in the cafeteria, get in some time with intramurals and then work while everyone else was asleep," he said. "I was quiet in high school. In college, I recreated myself; I got more involved and became more extroverted. Temple gave me the tools to build my life on — it was a great start."
Ruth also got his start in the "real world" — though anyone working 40 hours a week is already there — while still taking classes at Temple.
"There was a career fair downtown, but I had no real game plan going in. I wore a suit, which was a big deal for me — now I wear one every day," he laughed. "There were recruiters in there that weren't talking with anyone, so I went up and took the chance to talk with them. I walked out of there with two offers and an internship with Arthur Andersen."
The Arthur Andersen representative, Ruth said, asked him for his grade point average, "and I said if that's all the company cared about, maybe I didn't want to work for them — I'm a lot more than just my grades."
"He asked me to whisper it to him. I did and I got the offer. I believe they saw what I was doing with my life, the kind of person that I was — I succeeded because I had the nerve to ask," he said. "There's a piece of advice I give a lot. If we took all the time spent worrying about how hard or how tough something is and instead used every amount of energy on what we can do and how we can manage it, just think of how much more we could accomplish."
There are insights that you can give yourself, Ruth said, "to think and behave a certain way."
"No matter how much I needed to do or how difficult it might be to accomplish everything, I was never exhausted," he said. "I was energized!"