On Tuesday, March 28, Tyler Riewer, Brand Content Lead at charity:water, spoke to Nebraska students and campus community members about the influence that activities outside classroom played in his professional experiences.

A 2004 graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Riewer worked in the advertising field for eight years. While working in Portland, charity:water, a nonprofit dedicated to providing clean water to people in need, reached out to ask him to join their team.

As the brand content lead, Riewer tells stories that inspire people to donate to the nonprofit. To find and tell these stories, he travels to rural communities across the globe and films the experiences of life without access clean water.

Riewer showed a video of a young Ethiopian girl who spends hours of her day finding and transporting water back to her family, only for the water to make them sick. Transporting water back to the village is a challenging task, and it made Riewer, who decided to accompany the girl on her journey, extremely exhausted.

After the video, Riewer shared three factors that put him on a path to success and helped him get a job doing what that he loves. 

The first factor he discussed was his education. Through classroom and internship experiences, Riewer learned how to tell stories and work for real clients.

Second, Riewer emphasized the importance of participating in projects outside of the classroom. In his examples, he laughed about mastering Photoshop by putting his face on movie posters, spending late nights and weekends playing with video equipment to broadcast his own show and learning to consistently write by blogging about eating Spam for 30 days. His humorous video that encouraged people to meet their neighbors and host a barbecue, just another weekend project, was the reason charity:water offered him a position.

In his third point, Riewer spoke about the importance of always saying yes to an experience. During his freshman year of college, Riewer spent a week building houses out-of-state through a service-learning opportunity. Not a project he initially sought out, he explained this was one of most transformational experiences during his college career. For spring break his sophomore year, Riewer traveled alone to Rome after the friends he planned on going with never bought a plane ticket.

“Don’t say no to an experience,” said Riewer. “Embrace all of the opportunities that you are given.”

Following his presentation, Riewer joined students in the Georgian Suite for a dessert reception hosted by the Center for Civic Engagement.

Riewer was the inaugural speaker for Big Red Talks, a new series hosted by Student Affairs and sponsored by ALLO Communications. Through Big Red Talks, organizers seek to inspire students and demonstrate the impact of experiences outside the classroom.

View the full Big Red Talks presentation