by jlansber | Nov 13, 2022 | Alumni Profiles, Professional Development
Nicole R. Robinson (BUS ’92, MBA ’00)
“I was a kid of the four P’s: public school, public libraries, public parks and public safety net programs,” says Nicole R. Robinson (BUS ’92, MBA ’00), a proud Chicago South Sider and the CEO of the YWCA of Metropolitan Chicago.
From the time that she was a teenager, Robinson had an unflinching curiosity. She would ask herself, Why is it that some people are wildly successful and other people struggle? Why can’t everyone do well and do good?
“I didn’t have the language around equity and philanthropy because those were things I hadn’t been exposed to at that point,” she says.
Needing to stay local for family but wanting to explore beyond her neighborhood, Robinson enrolled at DePaul University to pursue her undergraduate degree. She began as a liberal arts major before switching to finance. Her curiosity was set on fire at DePaul. “I was curious about civic engagement and thinking about business in the broader sense. I didn’t know then all the buzzwords we use today to describe a company that is being successful in capitalism and also making an investment in society, but I kept asking myself: How do I do well and do good?”
From Corporate Finance to Corporate Social Responsibility
After graduating from DePaul, Robinson worked in finance for 10 years while also engaging in her community through social activism. Eventually she moved to Kraft Foods and worked her way through the ranks until she found her niche through an opportunity that had presented itself—in corporate social responsibility. Career pivots were not as common then as they are now, but it was a risk Robinson was willing to take despite all the advice she received to stay in her lane.
“I ended up being promoted three times, succeeded the person who hired me and got the title and compensation everyone said I wouldn’t get,” she reflects. “I got to travel all around the world as part of my job. I got to see and experience things I never imagined I would do as a little Black girl from the South Side of Chicago.”
Robinson eventually moved into nonprofit leadership and became chief partnership and programs officer for the Greater Chicago Food Depository, where she helped guide the organization’s mobilization of services to feed food-insecure Chicagoans during the pandemic. In 2021 she was the unanimous choice of the YWCA Metropolitan Chicago’s board of directors’ search committee to be the organization’s next CEO.
Today Robinson feels like she has come full circle through her leadership role at YWCA, a nonprofit whose mission includes eliminating racism and empowering women. “Both DePaul and the YWCA were born and shaped in Chicago. We have shared values that focus on making society more equitable. At the YWCA we strive to accomplish our mission by building bridges between all stakeholders in our community. We help organizations have conversations about equity, gender, belonging and inclusion and how to create that in workspaces. One of our programs that drives this is called ‘Until Justice Just Is,’ and it’s one way DePaul alumni can collaborate with us so that we can, as DePaul says, ‘do Chicago proud.’”
DePaul and the YWCA have, in fact, collaborated through the Driehaus College of Business Women in Entrepreneurship Institute (WEI) in 2021. The partnership brought WEI’s business accelerator program to a cohort of Chicago-area entrepreneurs who are women of color.
As for that question Robinson has asked herself throughout her career—“How do I do well and do good?”—she finally feels like she’s answered it.
“I realized the answer is not a destination. It’s a way of life, and I’m living it,” she says. “That question was guiding my purpose. It allowed me to figure out how I wanted to use my voice and talents and how I wanted to show up in the world.”
Nicole R. Robinson’s Advice for Women Leaders
From first-generation college student to successful socially responsible leader, Robinson has these tips to share for aspiring women leaders.
Be open to the possibilities. Some people are good planners and have a timeline of where they want to be in one, two and five years. And to some extent that’s good if you know exactly what you want to do. But be open to things you hadn’t previously considered. Be open to other paths that present themselves to you. Trust your intuition.
Lean into your values and your authentic self as you build your career. Know what areas you want to gravitate to. Ask yourself: What impact do you want to make in this world? What industry do you want to influence? Some people will say they want to be a CEO and that’s their goal. But instead of focusing on what position or title you want to have, think about the broader landscape of what you care about and where you want to make a difference, then follow that. Be your authentic self, tap into your passion and unleash your creative genius to guide your career path.
Build a support system of allies. Being a leader can feel isolating. Being a leader and a woman and a person of color can feel even more so. As a leader you need a community of family, friends, peers, mentors and sponsors to support you. Connect with other leaders you can trust and lean on because that will help you thrive not just in your role but on a personal level too. As author and activist bell hooks said, one of the most vital ways we sustain ourselves is by building communities of resistance and resilience, places where we know we are not alone.
by jlansber | Nov 13, 2022 | Features
DePaul business major Olivia Perez
DePaul business major Olivia Perez only started college in September, but she already has a solid base of knowledge about the finance industry, thanks to her participation in summer finance programs hosted by the nonprofit Greenwood Project and DePaul.
Two summers ago, a guidance counselor at her high school, De La Salle Institute on the Chicago’s South Side, suggested that Perez enroll in the Greenwood Project’s Summer High School FinTech Institute. The program teaches computer coding, financial literacy and career skills to students of color. “I was initially planning to major in technology, specifically computer science, but I also had an interest in finance,” Perez says. She didn’t seriously consider finance as a career path, however, because she knew little about it and didn’t know anyone working in this field.
Her involvement in the Greenwood Project changed that. “I found the bridge that connected technology and finance,” she says. “It was a whole new world for me. I didn’t have anyone in my family in finance. So, it was nice be able to connect with other people who, like me, were interested in finance.”
After graduating high school last spring, Perez applied to the Driehaus College of Business and enrolled in a second Greenwood Project summer program, this time a 10-week finance boot camp at DePaul’s business college. Taught by DePaul finance professors, alumni and industry leaders, the program covered the fundamentals of finance and investing, as well as skills for communicating and presenting yourself effectively in a business setting.
Perez appreciated the program’s holistic approach and found a presentation by DePaul finance instructor Joe Silich (BUS ’92), head of The Silich Group at Morgan Stanley, particularly meaningful. “He mentioned that in order to be successful, you have to immerse yourself in the culture of finance professionals. You have to dress the part, and you have to come in with the right mindset.”
Perez says the program made her more confident about her decision to come to DePaul this fall and major in finance. “The professors gave us a glimpse of the curriculum at DePaul and were really approachable,” she says. “They made the subject easy for us to comprehend and made us feel comfortable to ask questions.” Perez plans to enroll in the Greenwood Project-DePaul program for college students next summer, which includes summer internships with financial service firms.
Creating more opportunities for underrepresented students to enter finance benefits both students and the industry, Perez observes.
“I feel that diversity is incredibly important,” she says. “The more diversity of thought and voices that an industry allows, the more creativity there is. For example, my being Hispanic and a woman—those are both groups that are not really well-represented in finance. And so I want to be a voice and to inspire others as well.”
By Robin Florzak
by jlansber | Nov 13, 2022 | Features
Seerat Kaler (BUS ’21)
Seerat Kaler (BUS ’21) is the daughter of immigrants who came to the United States from Punjab, an agricultural region in India, seeking to raise their children in a place that they believed would offer more opportunities for success. For Kaler, those opportunities came to fruition at the Driehaus College of Business, where she found people and programs committed to empowering her success.
Kaler entered DePaul with an interest in economics, but she didn’t quite know which career path to pursue. That changed when she attended DePaul’s annual career fair during her sophomore year and met representatives from CIBC U.S., including the head of the multinational bank’s financial institutions group. Before she knew it, Kaler and the executive had spoken for more than 40 minutes. She recalls sharing her passions, interests and motivations in life, and “he was gracious enough to look at my résumé and provide honest comments. It was an experience unlike any other career fair visit.”
Later on, Kaler successfully landed multiple internships at CIBC and interacted with stellar mentors along the way. “My internships at CIBC were my first exposure to commercial banking, and I really enjoyed it,” she says. “The hands-on experience taught me about various industries and their business models. The clients we serve taught me substantially about building wealth in America—specifically in business industries that are unexplored by my community.”
During her junior year she was accepted into the Keeley Center Academy, a selective, rigorous, two-year DePaul career-readiness program that provides students with the skills and contacts to become successful in finance. “It was a really intense experience, but what it did was it bridged the gap for people, like me, who have this great ambition to do something, but don’t really understand how this industry actually works. It taught me the ropes and made meeting industry professionals easy.”
Kaler and the seven other women students in her Keeley Center Academy cohort formed a tight-knit group to support each other as they pursued their studies and future careers in a field where men greatly outnumber women. The group began discussing how they could expand this support network to other women and business students from diverse backgrounds. This led Kaler and her classmates to found Females in Finance, a DePaul student organization dedicated to promoting allyship and leadership empowerment for women in finance.
“We launched in fall quarter (2020) and quickly went from eight to 64 members,” Kaler says. The organization also attracted strong industry collaboration, amassing a sizable endowment and support from companies that include Morgan Stanley, BMO Harris Bank and William Blair. The effort helped Kaler earn the Keeley Academy’s 2021 Most Inspirational Student Award.
After graduating with a bachelor’s in finance, Kaler joined CIBC full time as a commercial banking associate and, this past summer, was placed in the Loan Syndications group.
One of the key values Kaler holds as a follower of the Sikh religion is Vand Chhako, which means to share what you have and consume it as a community. Kaler embraces this value as a member of CIBC’s DePaul Campus Champion college recruiting team. Through her continuing contact with DePaul’s Females in Finance, she has helped recruit four female students for internships and full-time roles at CIBC in the past two years.
“This is the kind of progress I am trying to make,” Kaler says. “My main goal is to help as many people as possible. I don’t think there’s anything to gain from competing with people. That’s how I interact with people, and I’m hoping to keep that going for the rest of my career.”
By Robin Florzak
by jlansber | Nov 13, 2022 | Features
DePaul partnered with the nonprofit Greenwood Project to help deliver an in-person financial services summer boot camp to more than 200 Black and Latinx youth. (photo courtesy Greenwood Project).
DePaul collaborates with businesses, non-profits and alumni to empower the career ambitions of underrepresented students
While corporate America has made modest gains in diversifying its leadership, women and people of color remain underrepresented in the executive ranks of many industries.
Women represent a mere 5% of C-suite leaders, according to the McKinsey-LeanIn.Org Women in the Workforce 2022 report, and only 17% of executive roles are held by people of color, the Gartner 2021 Leadership Progression and Diversity Survey found.
“HR leaders cite a lack of diversity in the pipeline as the top challenge to diversifying the leadership bench,” Gartner noted in its report.
The Driehaus College of Business is taking an active role in addressing this challenge, and is in a unique position to spark progress as a business school serving diverse learners in the heart of Chicago’s business community. Inspired by DePaul University’s mission to ensure the success of students from underserved communities, the college is collaborating with businesses, nonprofits and alumni benefactors to help underrepresented students gain a foothold on the path to business leadership.
Examples of these collaborations include:
- A partnership with the nonprofit Greenwood Project to host summer programs at DePaul that introduce students from underrepresented communities to opportunities in the finance industry. Last summer more than 200 Black and Latinx high school and college students, largely from Chicago’s South and West sides, participated in Greenwood programs at the Driehaus College of Business.
- The launch of the Deloitte Foundation Accounting Scholars program at DePaul to fund scholarships for racially and ethnically diverse students seeking graduate accounting degrees, sponsored by Deloitte’s Making Accounting Diverse and Equitable initiative.
- Co-curricular career readiness programming at the Keeley Center Academy, and new student organizations for women and people of color in DePaul’s finance program, supported by finance industry donors.
- New KPMG-funded scholarships and analytics resources for underrepresented students pursuing Master of Science in Audit and Advisory Services degrees at DePaul.
- A summer accounting boot camp supported by a PwC INQuires Grant in 2022 for first-year DePaul students of color.
- Incubator programs to advance the success of DePaul and community women business founders, supported by the Women in Entrepreneurship Institute advisory board and industry sponsors.
- A new, yearlong, rigorous leadership development program for DePaul undergraduates that will start in 2023. The program is overseen by the business college’s Hay Center for Leadership Development, founded with a generous estate gift from alumnus and DePaul Trustee William E. Hay (MBA ’66, DHL ’06).
These initiatives seek to transform the lives of students while addressing one of the college’s priorities—to become an agent for social mobility, says Sulin Ba, dean of the Driehaus College of Business.
“A college education remains the most potent pathway for social mobility, yet disparities remain for students from underrepresented communities,” she says. “Many of our students are the first in their families to attend college, and they may have no industry connections or role models for accessing career opportunities in finance, accounting and other business fields. Our business community collaborations create opportunities for students to acquire mentors, career skills, internships and industry connections that allow them to turn their career ambitions into reality.”
Learn more about the impact of these initiatives through the profiles of three DePaul next-generation business leaders—a freshman, a graduate student and a recent alumna—whose success has been empowered by the Driehaus College of Business and its business community allies.
- Olivia Perez: The Greenwood Project and DePaul opened “a whole new world for me”
- Seerat Kaler: Paying it forward to empower women in finance
By Robin Florzak
by Sulin Ba | Nov 13, 2022 | Notes from the Dean
Dean Sulin Ba
I arrived in Chicago in late June after a 15-hour drive from the East Coast with one of my sons. As we approached the city on I-90, the Chicago skyline came into view, and I became quite emotional. I had been anticipating this moment since my appointment as dean was announced in January, and now I was finally at DePaul!
Chicago is full of energy and opportunity, and my optimism for the future has grown even stronger after finishing my first fall quarter at DePaul. I am excited to be among a group of new university leaders—including DePaul President Rob L. Manuel—who are eager to work with Chicago’s business, civic and nonprofit organizations to advance the success of our students and the community around us.
At the Driehaus College of Business, four new directors and chairs have joined our college leadership team this academic year, bringing fresh perspectives to our strategic planning. Our team has three top priorities:
- Strengthen our relationships with alumni and the business and nonprofit communities, with the goals of building visibility and mutually beneficial partnerships. This issue’s feature story tells how our collaborations with these communities are empowering career success for DePaul students from underrepresented communities, while expanding the pipeline of diverse talent heading into the business community.
- Cultivate faculty, staff and student engagement. This fall, our college emphasized greater in-person learning and activities, including more career networking and recruiting events on campus. Our community has responded enthusiastically to these opportunities to reengage.
- Comprehensively reviewing of our program portfolio. Our focus is on creating new, innovative programs and providing students with sought-after business skills. Our refreshed bachelor’s in business program curriculum and Driehaus Cup competition, which debuted this fall, and the college’s newly launched DePaul Executive Education programs, are examples of how we are addressing this priority.
Support from our alumni, business and nonprofit allies is essential for our college to address all three of these priorities. That’s why I have been working with our Driehaus College of Business Advisory Council of alumni and business leaders to expand our college’s networks and partnerships, including several that are highlighted in this issue. I also welcome your suggestions for connections and collaborations that support our goals. Together, we can ensure that the DePaul mission continues to prosper for many years to come, benefiting both the future business leaders we educate and the business community that relies on DePaul talent.
Sulin Ba
Dean
Driehaus College of Business
business.dean@depaul.edu
