After a career that took her from Dow Chemical to Monsanto to 3M to FedEx Corp., Lou Etta Burkins is now “engineering” a career in the ministry for the next chapter of her life.
Burkins (BS, Chemical Engineering ’88; MBA ’92) grew up in Memphis, the youngest of seven children. The salutatorian of her high school class, she was a first-generation college student. Her mother was a cook at a Jewish synagogue. Her father made golf clubs, and he and his brothers were among the city’s first Black golfers.
“I was a smart kid. I loved chemistry and I loved math,” she said. She decided to pursue engineering after meeting her high school guidance counselor’s two sons who were studying engineering.
During a visit to her high school, UT’s Fred Brown, who directed the College of Engineering’s Minority Engineering Scholarship Program (MESP) from 1975-1985, offered her a scholarship and a spot in the five-year co-op program that combined classroom learning with on-the-job experience.
Burkins spent the summer before her freshman year working at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, Ohio. After her freshman year, she alternated quarters in the classroom and working at P&G. June Moore, who directed the co-op program, was a mentor, checking in to ensure Burkins and the other students were thriving in their assignments.
Burkins said the co-op program taught her time management, project management, interpersonal communications, critical thinking, and problem-solving.
“When I was in school, I was laser focused on school,” she said. “When I was working, I was focused on the job.
“Joseph Perona, head of the chemical engineering department at the time, was my advisor and encouraged me to keep going when I wanted to give up.”
After several years working as a chemical engineer at Dow, 3M, and Monsanto, Burkins moved to FedEx. Armed with an MBA from UT, she transitioned into project management and global strategic planning.
“The most exciting thing I worked on at FedEx was the global networking planning playbook for the Chairman,” she said, describing the company’s 10-year blueprint for worldwide expansion.
While at FedEx, Burkins also served as an associate minister at New Sardis Baptist Church in Memphis. Although industry fulfilled the “brain” part of her, “ministry pushed me to use more of the heart and hand,” she said.
During the pandemic, Burkins created FinisHer’s Women’s Ministry, an online women’s ministry that now involves about 1,000 women.
She earned her master’s degree in religion in 2001 and her Master’s of Divinity in 2004, both from Memphis Theological Seminary. She is now active in Hope Church, a 10,000-member, multicultural, evangelical Presbyterian church. And she’s working on her doctorate in ministry at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, with plans to enter the ministry full-time.
In everything she’s done, from industry to the ministry, Burkins said she’s drawn on what she learned at UT.
“My engineering education provided the foundation,” she said. “It gave me the discipline I needed to be successful in whatever I decided to pursue. And it gave me a skill set so I can talk to anybody and work with anybody.”