When Tom Arata was medically grounded from the Air Force, he relied on his connections and resources as a UCCS student to embark on a new career.
Arata graduated from the Air Force Academy in 1980, as part of the first co-ed class. Following graduation, he completed pilot training and became an instructor pilot and relocated to Colorado Springs to teach while also pursuing his Master of Business Administration from UCCS, which he completed in 1987.
“The Air Force has always been good about encouraging officers to get advanced degrees,” said Arata. “The late ’80s was a time of booming things in the U.S. economy, and when I looked around, there was one school in southern Colorado that had its full accreditation as a business school, and that was UCCS, so it made the choice of school easy. Unfortunately, I got medically grounded from flying in the Air Force, and so I knew that that was no longer going to be my career path.”
When considering his new path and the options available, Arata looked to his business courses and discovered his next calling.
“I happened to be taking a class, I believe it was called Industrial Marketing, taught by Dr. Lex Higgins, so not about the consumer marketing of brand and things like that, but what business-to-business marketing was like,” Arata said. “That was a light switch moment for me of that knitted together many things in my mind about what interested me in the business world and where I thought I could contribute.”
Arata was soon recruited by Ecolab, a St. Paul-based company, where he worked for 25 years and saw the company grow from under $1 billion to over $15 billion in revenue before retiring a few years ago as a Senior Vice President.
“I had the opportunity to do assignments where I was the first person to ever do them, so it was taking some risk,” Arata explained. “What I found in every one of those assignments is that you’re bringing to it the totality of everything that you had learned and experienced to that point, which the education at this university is the foundation of. UCCS launched me on a career path I never could have imagined.”
“It took me to different parts of the country, took me to different industries, took me to the medical device industry, took me to the industrial gas business, and ultimately, it took me to Minnesota to work in a field of food safety and public health and saving water,” he continued. “It’s been an amazing journey around the world to different industries, different functions. And it all started here, at UCCS.”
Tom Arata is a distinguished alumnus who delivered the fall 2025 commencement keynote speech. View a list of other notable alumni here.