By Yvonne Ratledge (Class of 2024)
When Angela Smith (’96) spoke at an alumni chapter event, she fully expected to return to her seat afterward. What Smith did not anticipate was receiving her alma mater’s prestigious Accomplished Alumni Award presented by her husband, Courtney Smith (’90), at the end of her speech.
“The Accomplished Alumni Program features UT alumni who have achieved success in their respective careers, including recipients from astronauts to authors to Olympians to CEOs,” he began. “These successful alumni speak to students and alumni, share some of their life and career lessons, and build bridges between alumni, current students, and each other. Angela’s education at UT served as the foundation for her to succeed in her career, so it only makes sense that we honor her today.”
Smith became a Vol when she attended the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, pursuing an undergraduate degree in business administration. She has remained actively involved with the university by assisting with recruiting and establishing a scholarship in both her and her husband’s name.
“The [now Haslam] College of Business gave me a very good solid general business education that allowed me to easily step into my career,” says Smith. “My business degree from UT helped me prepare for MBA school, and it prepared me to get my doctorate at Georgia. I had all the tools I needed.”
Following her graduation, Smith began working for a management consulting firm and helped design and create information systems to manage finances for Fortune 500 companies.
“I was starting to understand how a big organization thinks about their dollars and cents,” says Smith. “I was learning how to help them make more money and profits. These were things that I was learning as an undergraduate, but now I was a part of it which was sort of thrilling and scary.”
Smith was enjoying the perks of her job and working her way up the corporate ladder when she had a pivotal, life-changing thought. She knew she wanted to make a positive impact on her community and leave behind a legacy of service and volunteerism. Smith, who was still pursuing her MBA at Clark Atlanta University at the time, began searching for a way to use her education for something more meaningful to her community. She met with her mentor, talked to her husband, and began taking real steps to shift her career.
“It was a point of realization for me,” says Smith. “I want to know that I’m making a difference—not on the balance sheet, not in terms of stockholder value, not in terms of revenue, but making a real difference.”
Smith was looking for new opportunities when one day her husband showed her a job ad in the newspaper.
“They were asking for business professionals to come into my local school district,” recalls Smith. “My husband said, ‘I think this might be the path.’ So one day I came home and told him I quit my job.”
Smith undertook the rigorous interview process, and out of thousands of applicants, became one of the few who got the job. Overnight she shifted her career from a corporate nine-to-five to teaching first graders and finishing up her MBA.
Just after Smith began getting comfortable in her new teaching position, one of her professors at Clark Atlanta University urged her to apply for a job working directly with the Atlanta Public Schools superintendent.
“He told me, ‘You can speak all these languages. You can speak consulting, you understand what happens in the classroom, and you understand bigger business concepts and strategy. You would be a perfect fit for working in the central office and supporting the superintendent,’” says Smith. “But I told him no.”
Smith’s professor was relentless, and over the course of a few months finally convinced her to interview with the chief strategy officer at Atlanta Public Schools, who was in process of creating a strategy office for the school district.
“I walked into the interview and the chief strategy officer said to me, ‘You’re who I’ve been looking for,’” says Smith. “She saw my background and said I was a perfect fit. From then I started working to improve the school system on all major initiatives.”
Smith’s education at UT and background in teaching helped her bring a fresh new perspective to Atlanta schools. The skills she developed at UT helped with her work on recruiting teachers from other fields, improving their salaries, and redesigning public high school education.
“That was a pivotal project for me,” says Smith. “The high school graduation rate was low. They didn’t have a lot of AP coursework. They didn’t have IB coursework. The dropout rate was really high. Career pathways were basically nonexistent other than your traditional vocational or cosmetology school.”
During Smith’s work, she redesigned the high schools into learning academies. The schools had specified learning pathways for students interested in everything from engineering to business to aviation to radio and TV. Through her work, Smith helped increase the graduation rate from 59 percent to the nearly 87 percent seen today.
“It has been extremely rewarding. It’s been hard work, but at the end of the day it’s amazing work that you don’t get in a corporate setting,” says Smith.
After years of working in Atlanta’s public school district, Smith moved on to work for educational consulting firms. At her current firm, where she is the first Black woman partner, she continues to redesign high school education.
The proudest moment of her career, though, is from her days working in Atlanta’s public school system.
“Seeing students walk across the graduation stage has been so rewarding,” says Smith. “But seeing my little first graders walk across the graduation stage made me incredibly proud.”
Many years have passed since Smith’s former students walked across the stage, and now it’s her turn to be honored.
“Receiving the Accomplished Alumni Award came out of left field,” says Smith. “You keep moving through life and don’t realize the impact you have.”
The university is proud to recognize Smith for her impact at UT and on the education of so many young people.
