Where they are now?

Omar Hurricane’ 90 is a Metro State physics grad who has received numerous honors worth thousands of dollars. But he traces his start on this super-academic trajectory to a “superman” stunt he pulled in 1986, when applying to Metro State.

According to an article in the July 1995 issue of Metropolis magazine, by Vonalda Utterback, Hurricane thinks it was a stunt that gave him the edge in 1986 for a Presidential Scholarship to attend Metro State. “Toward the end of the interview process for the scholarship, he recalls that the Metro State scholarship committee asked him, ‘Why should we give you this scholarship?’ Throwing open his suit coat and unbuttoning his shirt with a superman-type flourish, he revealed a Metro State T-shirt, and replied, ‘Because I bought one of your T-shirts!’”

In 2009 Omar accepted the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award for National Security and Nonproliferation. Named for Lawrence, a Nobel laureate and the inventor of the cyclotron, a subatomic particle accelerator, the U.S. Department of Energy honor is given to mid-career scientists for contributions supporting the DOE and its mission to advance the national, economic and energy security of the United States.

Hurricane, who attended Metro State on a scholarship based on the recommendation of his stepfather and Metro State English professor, the late Jerry Finger, says he received “a lot of extra attention from professors that I’m very grateful for now. I observed at UCLA that I was just as well prepared as any other student. I got a very good education.”

http://www.mscd.edu/~collcom/artman/publish/funfact_twv8100510.shtml

http://www.mscd.edu/~collcom/artman/publish/hurricane_twv7042810.shtml

https://www.llnl.gov/news/newsreleases/2009/NR-09-12-02.html