 As a young golf caddy on a Chick Evans Scholarship, Sam Allen chose Purdue for college where his path landed him at John Deere's top position. My name is Sam Allen. I'm the chairman and CEO of John Deere and in this role I get the opportunity to lead a company of roughly 40 billion in sales, over 70,000 employees that operates in over 140 countries with manufacturing facilities in approximately 24 countries and each and every day we get to work on building equipment to serve customers that are linked to the land. That's farmers, contractors, people that are building roads, wherever it may be across the globe. My goal from an educational standpoint at Purdue was, started out in engineering and I thought I was going to be in engineering for the first two and a half years of my career, my time there and then in the last year and a half I transitioned more into industrial management. Senator Macklemore, who came out of industry before that, had a class, now called the Cranard Executive Forum. I was one of the students that he had escort executives from a number of different companies. One of them later on was John Deere and through that I ended up interviewing with John Deere as a result of taking the executive round. His name was Bud Lundahl and they offered a job and after coming to this building where we're standing right here it kind of cemented that for me and as a result of that I ended up with the company. When I think about the giant leap of my life, it's certainly being the CEO and chairman of this company. I'm in my ninth year of this 181 year old company and I'm only the ninth person to ever have this position and when I think about Purdue, Purdue gave me the breadth of knowledge, not because I took a lot of engineering courses, I took a lot of marketing and business courses. The combination of all that through the first half of my career allowed me to transition from many, many different areas, from running engineering, running sales and marketing forces in various areas of the globe. That all then coupled together gave me a unique set of capabilities to then inherit the opportunity to do this job as chairman and CEO. That was Sam Allen. Look for more stories at purdue.edu slash footprints.