Stories

It is always nice to revisit an alma mater, and so it was with Tom Juntunen '12, who graduated with a BS in Civil Engineering. Tom came to SCU to lecture in Janet Giddings ‘Religious Ethics in Business’ class in Winter 2017.  With Tom’s understanding of the Jesuit mission, his business acumen and current business studies, students were offered a challenging presentation and discussion.

Tom is currently finishing an MBA at USF, graduating in June. He works for Gap Inc. in retail construction and estimating, and also has time to be President of the Entrepreneurship Club. Tom presented “Using the Sharing Economy Mindset for Urban Innovation” which offered students a topic they could consider from the various frameworks of religious ethics: Hindu, Buddhist, Confucian, Judaism, Christianity, Islam.

The ‘sharing economy’ has many benefits and Juntunen listed a few such as renting or borrowing goods instead of buying or owning them; favoring the service-model approach, and pay-per-use. He argued these systems foster micro-entrepreneurship and create innovations from the bottom up. There were examples of new companies who work from this model and although much of it sounded positive, with Tom’s SCU training he also introduced opposing views of these business models. This opened the discussion to questions of justice from the different religious ethical systems. Students benefit from visits by alumni and as Religious Ethics in Business student Raphael Guzman '18 said, “It was great to have Mr. Juntunen back on campus to tell us his story and share with our class the knowledge he accumulated over the years. It is great to see when Broncos come back to campus with the intention of giving back to their community.”