“Around the age of 21 was about the point that I'd had so many experiences with both cultures that as I started talking to people, people who were Black saw a lot of themselves in me, but then also people who were white saw themselves in me. That made it very easy to be able to lead more effectively and be able to move in between different communities with relative ease.” Dan’s ability to connect has fueled his success in higher education. He was the second entrepreneurship professor at the University of Delaware, where he received his Bachelors and Masters in Marketing. He acquired his Ph.D. in Marketing and secured certificates of entrepreneurship at UPenn and Babson College, and his accolades continue to grow.
Finance Institute at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. It was a partnership between the Wharton School and students at HBCUs across the country to provide badges and certificates in the field of finance and private equity. The initiative was designed to help more young people of color with finance, investment banking, and private equity, as only about 1% of private equity employees are people of color. Dan, knowing what it is like to be one of the few, was tasked with designing all the courses for the online platform. building masterclasses,” he says, “creating curriculum, creating standards, and creating course maps.” He then had to identify professors who were able to teach at that level, helping them to structure their content and then working with production studios to record their masterclass “It's almost like
video content online in a way that it's palatable and enjoyable for the average nineteen- to twenty-one- year-old, Black HBCU students. “That was very entertaining,” Dan says. Running the Institute was an entrepreneurial venture within a large bureaucratic institution. “I would venture to say it's significantly harder to be entrepreneurial inside of a college or university than it is to be an entrepreneur.” He also has the experience of engaging with several large institutions like the University of Delaware, Temple University, and Wilmington University. “Trying to decode how to change higher education became something that I was really good at and why I was able to progress through a number of different schools through a number of different opportunities.” Part of what kept Dan engaged in higher education was the students. Page 25
On Faculty
Dan was most recently the founding director of the Wharton-Alt
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