I AM UAA: Tom Jantunen

Alumni Spotlight: Thomas Jantunen
B.B.A. Finance '04
Hometown: Various cities in Canada, including Thunder Bay, Banff and Calgary
Fun Fact: Considers UAA "the Harvard of the north"

 

Tom Jantunen chose UAA sight unseen. He had been ski racing for four years after attending high school at the Banff Mountain Ski Academy when a friend suggested that UAA would be a great place to continue ski racing and get an education. Having competed around the world, and recognizing that his dream of competing on the World Cup would not be realized, Tom thought UAA and NCAA ski racing presented a great opportunity to come to Alaska. An athletic scholarship sealed the deal. So he met the Seawolves in Salt Lake City in the spring of 2000, and started racing with the team without ever having seen campus.

"NCAA ski racing gave me the opportunity to compete with Olympians and other extremely talented skiers from around the world," Tom says. When he competed, downhill skiing was different than most sports because the NCAA was not a direct stepping stone to professional sports or the Olympics. Now, however, Tom says that UAA and NCAA ski racing provide a fantastic platform for athletes to develop the skills that are needed to compete at a World Cup level. When Tom enrolled at UAA he recognized that it would be a great place to ski competitively as well as a great place to go back to school.

The pragmatic side of Tom chose business administration and finance as his focus in between ski races. He liked the job opportunities that having a finance degree would provide. And for those same reasons, he ultimately chose to go to law school.

"I think my UAA education was really fantastic," he says, "And if UAA had had a law school, I wouldn't have left after my undergrad."

He also says that he never felt like he was at a disadvantage in law school: "I felt that my UAA education really set me up to compete well with everybody else."

And as for Alaska, it was here waiting for Tom right after law school in the form of a clerkship with the Alaska Supreme Court.

"I literally came back a week after graduation," he says, this time with a new wife whom he met in the law program at the University of Denver. After the clerkship, the two moved to Juneau for two years and then back to Anchorage again.

Busy being a dad to two-year-old Finnegan these days, Tom still finds time to stay engaged with his alma mater. He was recently a member of the UAA Alumni Task Force, a hand-picked group of alums who came together to help the university brainstorm ways to strategically engage our 40,000+ graduates.

What does Tom think about living in this university town? "There are no negatives to having a hometown university in Anchorage," he says. "The biggest benefits are to keep homegrown talent here, to provide a place for locals to be educated, and to provide a place for research. I'm a big believer in education and there's nothing you could say that is bad about having a university in our community."

Tom is now a civil litigation attorney with Perkins Coie in downtown Anchorage, and his wife does criminal defense for the Office of Public Advocacy. He loves getting outdoors with his family, dipnetting and hitting the slopes whenever he can. He came to Alaska after years of following winter around the globe. With our short summer and shoulder seasons, this state's seemingly endless winter doesn't seem to bother Tom at all, so he stayed. And that doesn't bother us at all.