Ken Rich\u2019s dream on his first day on campus was to become Purdue University\u2019s 1959 senior class president.<\/p>\n
When Rich was 12, he was scared by his father having serious brain surgery, so he set his sights on achieving an \u201cimportant position.\u201d Rich\u2019s goal to pursue student government started in high school when he read about a student who had overcome adversity to become president of his senior class at Penn State University \u2014 a position that sounded \u201cimportant.\u201d<\/p>\n
However, as a first-year student majoring in electrical engineering, Rich was pulled aside his first day on campus during his physical examination and told he wouldn\u2019t graduate from Purdue unless he improved his speech.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":48121,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[61,14],"tags":[2610,263,350,2609,2611,2038,240],"class_list":["post-48118","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-speech-language-and-hearing-sciences","tag-cary-quadrangle","tag-college-of-health-and-human-sciences","tag-department-of-speech-language-and-hearing-sciences","tag-ken-rich","tag-lyles-porter-hall","tag-m-d-steer-speech-language-and-hearing-clinics","tag-purdue-university"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n