For years, Richard Gutkowski committed himself to teaching and helping CSU civil engineering students hone their technical talents before they launched into professional careers. College can be a financial burden for many, and Gutkowski helped ease this burden by providing jobs, internships and graduate assistantships to students.

Now retired, he has taken a sidestep from civil engineering to continue helping them financially, but in a very different way. In 2014, he undertook writing a book series on debt management. His purpose is to present the topics using everyday life viewpoints and experiences.

First book in series

The first book in the series, DEBT is a Four-Letter Word, But it Need Not Be! The College Experience, deals with issues he saw many students struggling with: student loans and credit cards. The fictionalized story uses real-life examples as it follows a young woman named Nicole and her father, who also serves as her advisor. It explores how a young person encounters debt as she moves from high school into college and through graduation. As her life proceeds, she confronts successive realistic situations involving taking on debt. Readers follow the caring, wise way that Nicole’s dad teaches her the concepts, methods and calculations needed to manage debt, and steadily helps her ween away to increased self-reliance.

Gutkowski converted his lifetime of bad and good experiences and subsequent growth with smart, strategic college debt management into a powerful sequence of practical lessons. They compact many years of development into a set of powerful guides to help readers gain that knowledge and ability.

Gutkowski is an emeritus professor in the Department of Civil Engineering at Colorado State University. During his career, he directed a structural engineering laboratory, two technology transfer and training centers in transportation engineering (one for Native American tribal entities) and a regional consortium for transportation education and research. In those responsibilities he managed budgets totaling millions of dollars.

DEBT is a Four-Letter Word, But it Need Not Be! The College Experience, is available on Amazon.