“I’m in the position right now to be one of those alums that can make large donations back to the school out of recognition for all that the university did for me or made available for me or the opportunities that the university provided me.”

Recently, Brown, along with the president of Spartan Internet Consulting Corp., Ryan Vartoogian, received the Distinguished Young Alumni Award from the MSU Alumni Association.

The Distinguished Young Alumni Award has been given out for two years in order to recognize young alumni’s accomplishments, said Cheryl Denison, the association’s director of alumni services and events, in an e-mail.

“It was a great honor for me to receive that award,” Brown said. “It was gratifying to see our MSU (Alumni) Club of West Michigan recognized for all the great things that we do.”

Vartoogian graduated in 2001 with a degree in environmental economics. He was made aware that he would receive the award a couple of months ago.

“I was surprised and excited, and definitely honored at the award,” Vartoogian said.

Vartoogian created Lansing-based Spartan Internet Consulting in 1997 when he was a sophomore at MSU.

His consulting company does strategic planning for businesses based around the Internet and also does Web implementation projects to help bring those strategies to life, he said.

“It was just a combination of always wanting to do something entrepreneurial and at the same time, East Lansing was one of only two cities in the country that were pilot-testing high-speed cable Internet access … having that kind of infrastructure in place really made it feasible to venture out,” Vartoogian said.

“At that time most people were still on dial-up, so it was kind of a natural field that I had interest in both from a technological and business perspective to do something different.”

Brown said he focuses on making sure the people he works with actually feel like people, through his work as an attorney and partner at Miller Johnson.

“It’s a matter of making people feel comfortable and a matter of making people feel valuable,” Brown said.

“One of the things that I enjoy the most as a lawyer is the ability to break down stereotypes of what lawyers actually are like.”

Vartoogian said his favorite aspect of MSU is the campus because he still feels very much a part of it.

“We’re pretty heavily involved with Michigan State through what we do as a company and through different student groups, so the ability to kind of stay connected with the university is something that we enjoy,” he said.

Brown said the growth of the law college has made him proud to be an MSU alumnus.

“Hopefully with the new dean and with President (Lou Anna K.) Simon’s direction, we’re heading into even more of a greater accomplishment on the horizon here soon and that things are stabilized yet energized at the same time.”