“Life is never linear. If a door is open to you, push through it — and you never know where it’ll take you.” USC Viterbi School of Engineering Dean Yannis C. Yortsos on one of his final trips to India as dean.
Long before he became the longest-serving dean in the history of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, Yannis C. Yortsos was a young student in Greece who dreamed of studying abroad. As he and his friends prepared their applications for Master’s programs in the United States, they hit upon an ingenious plan. “My friends and I went to the Fulbright Office and got some maps and brochures,” Yortsos recalled. “We didn’t want to compete with each other for admissions, so we divided the U.S. into sectors.” He was assigned the West Coast — and that, as much as anything, is how a young engineer from Athens found his way to California, and eventually to USC.
“If a door is open to you, push through it — and you never know where it’ll take you.” Yannis Yortsos
It is a story Yortsos shared this month as he traveled to Mumbai and Bengaluru for one of his final visits to India as dean. After 21 years leading the school, he will step down at the end of June and return to the faculty. And the path that brought him there — full of turns he never saw coming — was the story he reflected on. “Life is never linear,” he says. “If a door is open to you, push through it — and you never know where it’ll take you.”
