While cruising down the Mekong River in Laos in a rickety old motor boat six years ago, Greg Pepping had an epiphany.
“It doesn’t really happen to people very often,” notes Pepping, a 34-year-old UW-Madison grad student who serves as the school’s Peace Corps representative. “But everything sort of crystallized for me at that exact moment.”
A few months earlier, Pepping – who grew up in southern Iowa and attended Drake University – had quit a high-paying insurance job in Washington, D.C., because he felt empty and unfulfilled.