Planning Lab Dedication

The Walter G. Fields III Planning Lab room dedication ceremony was held on March 22, 2024.

Brewster Building D-209 was named after Walter G. Fields, III, a donor who established the Walter G. Fields III Scholarship Endowment. The scholarship will support undergraduate students majoring in Community and Regional Planning and provide them with professional internships. 

Walter G. Fields, III graduated in 1971 with a Bachelor’s Degree in Geography with a concentration in City and Regional Planning.

“I have been a planner. My first job was Tuesday after Labor Day of 1972. For 52 years and counting, I have enjoyed the work, enjoyed the challenges, and enjoyed working in the community, whether as a government employee or working with a community on a development proposal. … … I felt so strongly about the need for planning students to not sit in the building but to get out to the community. … …  The internship, to me, is not the most important course that students may take, but it will put them right up near the top. I’m most hopeful that this endowment creates an opportunity for planning undergraduate students to get out in the real world between their Junior and Senior years … because that’s where they learn the stuff they don’t learn from a textbook.”

“I’m very proud. I’m getting a little bit choked up here. I really am glad to have been a student of East Carolina. I literally walked out of here and went right to work. That’s what West Henkins was so focused on for all those years: when you left this program, you were useful in the community the next day.”

– Walter Fields III’s speech during the naming ceremony