How I Made It: Sung Won Sohn
The gig: Economist Sung Won Sohn, 66, is always in motion.
He holds the Martin V. Smith professorship at Cal State Channel Islands in Camarillo, where he also directs the Institute for Global Economic Research. He’s vice chairman of the board of clothing chain Forever 21 Inc., based in Los Angeles, and sits on the boards of Western Alliance Bank Corp. in Phoenix and Torrey Pines Bank in San Diego.
And Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa recently appointed the Hancock Park resident to a five-year term on the commission overseeing the Port of Los Angeles.
“I would never retire,” said Sohn, a certified charter boat skipper who would like a bit more free time for sailing. “That’s the worst thing I could do.”
Coming to America: Sohn was born and raised in Seoul through the early 1960s when his homeland began to change from an undeveloped Asian economy to an industrial powerhouse.
After graduating from high school at 17, Sohn traveled alone to the United States to attend the University of Florida in Gainesville on a partial scholarship.
“In those days, coming to the U.S. was kind of like going to the moon,” he said. “My father [a bank president] thought I was crazy.”
Sohn studied economics “so I could come back and help the Korean economy,” he said, but that never happened because the United States offered him “one opportunity after another.”
His mentor: While learning English, he got a job in the library and gained a mentor in Hazen Nutter, a professor of education at the university. Nutter brought Sohn to live with his family.
“Obviously, that was a big help, but a bigger help was his advice,” he said. “In America all by myself, I didn’t know what to do a lot of the time.”
Nutter, he said, told him to “be honest and do your best.”
On a fast track: After earning a master’s degree in economics from Wayne State University in Detroit, Sohn went to the University of Pittsburgh for his doctoral studies in commercial banking, where his advisor was Marina von Neumann Whitman.
But Whitman soon left the school to join President Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisors. Still, Sohn sent her his dissertation on a special formula for managing assets and liabilities. She liked it and brought him to work with her in Washington just as the clouds of the Watergate scandal closed in on the president.
“It was very depressing,” he recalled. “All the energy was spent obviously on Watergate. Everything else didn’t matter that much.”
Sohn was the administration’s liaison to banks and investment houses and had to write a memo to Nixon every Friday about the state of the financial markets.
One slow Friday, Sohn wrote about the market for so-called Eurodollars — U.S. capital that circulated overseas and never was repatriated or exchanged for other currencies. The following Monday, Nixon sent him a scrawled message: “What the hell is the Eurodollar market!”
The banker: In New York, financier David Rockefeller introduced him to the president of Northwest National Bank in Minnesota, where Sohn worked through various mergers and name changes for 31 years. He left as chief economist for Wells Fargo. In 2005, he moved to Los Angeles to run his own Korean-American bank, Hanmi Financial Corp., staying for two years.
Family: Sohn married Yoon Sohn, whom he met the traditional way through a matchmaker in South Korea. The couple has a son, Andrew, a junior at Harvard-Westlake School, a private junior high and high school.
“In our culture, you get married and then fall in love,” Sohn explained.
Advice: Sohn tells his graduate students, candidates for master’s degrees in business administration, that it’s not enough to get top grades. They need to be good speakers and writers who can tackle any job-related task.
More important, he stresses to his increasingly multicultural students that they need to be proud of being American.
“I look at myself,” he said. “No other place would have accepted me and made me what I am today.”
