Let’s begin David Sweeny’s story far from New York City, but in a likely place, 300 miles north in Burlington, Vermont, where the 1987 alumnus has returned to talk with current undergrads.

Sweeny, a Brooklyn-based industrial redeveloper who heads up his own PDS Development Corporation, has a central message he wants to share, particularly with the seniors who will soon be leaving college’s dewy meadow behind for what might seem a very scary professional world.

“What I wanted to hear when I was graduating was a little ‘relax,’” Sweeny says. “There are lots of interesting ways to meet interesting people, to make enough money so you can live, and to learn and advance. My career, in hindsight, looks like it had a path. But I was always just, honestly, sort of entering the woods at wherever the next turn appeared.”

That said, Sweeny was one of those grads that makes his yet-to-be-hired friends cringe a bit. Graduate on Saturday, move on Sunday, start work on Monday. Sweeny, who is blind, had begun to lose his sight to ocular cancer not long after graduation. But he recalls that in the spring of 1987 he still had the vision to search for a job the old-fashioned way—circle every help wanted ad that seemed remotely possible in the New York Times classifieds and send out a blitz of cover letters and resumes.

That first job was with the non-profit North Brooklyn Development Association.  A summer internship on Wall Street had shown the economics major that a more traditional path in the financial world wasn’t a good fit for him.

He was also guided by an interest in economic injustice issues that he says was born during his years at UVM. “A lot of great professors opened my eyes to it in an exciting, but gentle way. It never felt heavy-handed or moralistic, it just sort of said, ‘Here’s the data.’”

In Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood, Sweeny led a project that would help shift the data. “I became very interested in how do you retain competitive business in an urban setting, then very interested in how you promote the formation and early growth of small businesses,” Sweeny says. In Greenpoint, the answer was the renovation of five neglected industrial spaces, creating incubator space for as many as 130 fledgling businesses.

PDS Development continues to work in a similar vein, buying vacant industrial buildings in Brooklyn and Queens, renovating and leasing them.

“Our buildings are always a really interesting mish-mash of personalities. Diverse business owners making a diversity of things,” Sweeny says. “That can be a lot of fun because we can have somebody who is doing architectural metal working next door to somebody who is making really high-end artisanal gin next to somebody who is selling floor coverings. So they sort of represent that whole working part of the city economy.”