by Meredith Carroll | Nov 18, 2025 | Alumni Profiles
This summer, four Driehaus alumni were named to Crain’s Chicago Business’ annual list of Notables in Finance. They are: Sheena Gray (LAS ’04, MBA ’18), Karen Larson (MBA ’14), Nicole Latimer Williams (BUS ’96), and Marianne Markowitz (MBA ’92).
The Driehaus alumni stand out not just for their extraordinary leadership in sectors as diverse as city government, higher education, and human resources, but for their commitment to giving back.
Whether they’re working to narrow the Black wealth gap or the gender lending gap; whether they’re expanding access to higher education or workforce development — for all four women, social good is woven into the work they do.
Driehaus got the chance to speak with a couple of the honorees. Read on for their reflections on their career journeys and how Driehaus fits in.
Karen Larson (MBA ’14)
When did you know that finance was the field for you?
I realized early in my career that I was drawn to the intersection of strategy and numbers. Finance gave me a way to both understand the bigger picture and translate it into actionable decisions. What sealed it for me was seeing how financial stewardship could directly impact people’s lives — whether through organizational growth, job creation, or community investment. That sense of purpose has kept me in the field.
How would you sum up your DePaul experience in one word?
Compass. My time at DePaul gave me clarity and direction — it helped me figure out what I wanted to pursue in my career.
Is there something that you learned at DePaul that you still think about today?
Adaptability. DePaul taught me to think critically and apply knowledge in new ways, which continues to guide how I approach challenges and opportunities.
HIRE360 is a relatively young organization — and you’ve been with it since the beginning. What has that experience taught you about managing growth in an organization? About the role of building systems from the ground up, rather than working within existing systems? How did you navigate the balance of opportunity and uncertainty?
Helping to build HIRE360 from the ground up has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my career. It taught me that growth isn’t just about scaling numbers — it’s about building the right systems and culture to sustain that growth. Starting from scratch gave us the freedom to design processes that truly serve our mission, but it also meant navigating uncertainty every day. I’ve learned to embrace that balance by grounding decisions in data while staying open to innovation. Growth requires patience, persistence, and trust in the team you’re building with.
What do you love about what you do? What do you wish more people understood about finance and operations?
I love that my work creates the foundation for impact. Finance and operations may not always be the most visible part of an organization, but they are the structures that make everything else possible. What I wish more people understood is that finance is not just about spreadsheets and compliance — it’s about enabling opportunity. Strong financial and operational systems give organizations the freedom to dream bigger and serve more people. At HIRE360, that means helping communities thrive by creating pathways to lifelong careers in the unionized construction trades.
Marianne Markowitz (MBA ’92)
When you founded First Women’s Bank, you did so with the goal of closing the “gender lending gap.” What contributes to this gap in who access capital?
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that the issue isn’t just about a gap in who can access capital. It is often linked to a confidence gap. One of the barriers women often encounter is the fear they feel: fear of discussing financing, or a magnified fear of failure. Helping a client or prospect feel seen, heard, and validated can help close that confidence gap and set them on the path to accessing capital.
As the founder of a new bank, you’re an entrepreneur yourself. At the same time, part of your business is lending to fledgling businesses. What has that taught you about lending to entrepreneurs?
We are the first new bank to launch in Illinois in over 15 years. While we have graduated from the start-up stage, our recent experience raising capital and building a team to launch a bank from the ground up — during a pandemic no less — gives us the ability to understand the persistence required to succeed.
Our first-hand experience of the daily pressures faced by entrepreneurs makes us a uniquely empathic financing partner. We understand the significance of the end result, but also the importance of saving minutes along the way, the critical need for frequent communication and creative solutions.
The entrepreneurial journey is difficult for everyone — but maybe doubly so in industries with tight regulations and a high need for trust. What has the process of launching a bank taught you about entrepreneurship?
Banking is a highly regulated, capital-intensive space where trust is everything. When we launched First Women’s Bank, we weren’t just trying to build a compliant institution – we were reimagining what a bank could be and how it should show up for women and small businesses. That required a fundamentally entrepreneurial mindset: relentless problem-solving, bold vision, and a deep belief in the mission, even when the odds felt stacked against us at times.
At the same time, I’ve learned that being an entrepreneur means you need to be both visionary and incredibly detail oriented. You must imagine the future while operating within a highly structured system. That tension can be challenging, but it’s also where real innovation happens.
When you think back on your career, what were some of the major turning points? How would you advise today’s students?
One of the most transformative moments in my career was realizing that I didn’t have to choose between using my skills and living my values, they could be aligned. When that happened, everything shifted. Work became more fulfilling, and I felt like I was contributing to something much larger than myself.
That doesn’t mean every step in your career will be perfectly aligned. Early on, I had roles that challenged me to grow and develop my skills, even if they didn’t fully reflect my personal mission. But over time, I kept coming back to that alignment. And when I finally stepped into roles, like launching First Women’s Bank, where purpose and expertise met, it was life changing.
For students, especially those just starting out, my advice is this: get clear on what matters most to you. Not just in terms of what you want to do, but in the kind of impact you want to have. Your values are your compass. They help you make decisions when things are uncertain, and they give you the strength to say yes or no when it really counts.
So be patient but be intentional. Ask yourself: Does this opportunity move me closer to the kind of leader I want to become? And don’t be afraid to take risks that align with your purpose, even if they’re outside the traditional path. That’s where the most meaningful growth happens.
by Meredith Carroll | Nov 12, 2025 | Features, Giving Back, Student Stories
From faculty research to an entrepreneurial internship program, a look into the benefits of being one of a new company’s earliest employees
Here’s what entrepreneurship means to Tasha Shaw, a Chicago-based founder and recent host to an intern from DePaul’s Coleman Entrepreneurship Center: the ability not just to cook for people but to cultivate community. The recognition that food isn’t only about physical nourishment— it’s also about healing and cultural connection.
Shaw’s South Side business, Wake, Bake and Heal, provides prepared meals for the elderly, working professionals, and others who are too busy to cook for themselves. Her offerings range from classics like mac and cheese and collard greens to corn that’s brined for days in molasses and whisky before it’s charred on the grill.
A professionally trained chef, Shaw started her business after taking care of her aunt, who suffered from dementia and heart failure. She saw what a difference fresh-cooked food made for her aunt — and she noticed that this food wasn’t readily available to others in similar situations.
Fast-forward to today and Wake, Bake and Heal is at a critical point in the entrepreneurial lifecycle. It’s a growing business; Shaw hopes to open a brick-and-mortar location that includes a cafe. Getting there, though, will require juggling long-term visions with the day-to-day hustle of keeping a business running.
Early employees play a critical role in shaping startups’ futures, DePaul professor’s research reveals
At nascent firms like Wake, Bake and Heal, growth requires a delicate balance. Move too slowly and opportunities slip away. Push too fast, and the founder’s original mission can get lost in expansion.
Early-stage employees play a critical role in helping businesses strike that balance, argues James Bort, an assistant professor of entrepreneurship at DePaul. Bort’s latest research, published in the prestigious Academy of Management Review, focuses on startups’ earliest employees.
At established companies, most employees execute pre-defined strategies or carefully honed visions. At emerging ventures, Bort said, employees take on a more fluid and influential role. They help businesses expand their reach. That work, in turn, realizes — and refines — founders’ visions. In short, early-stage employees get the rare opportunity to shape the story of the businesses they work for.
Most entrepreneurship offerings for college students target aspiring founders. But working at a fledgling business as one of its first employees, Bort’s research suggests, can offer uniquely valuable, formative experiences.
From research to practice: DePaul students gain experience as interns at early-stage companies
That’s where the internship program at DePaul’s Coleman Entrepreneurship Center comes in.
Each summer, Director of Emerging Company Programs Emily Doyle sifts through dozens (and occasionally, hundreds) of applications to hand-select students whose interests align with the center’s pool of internship hosts.
The program reflects DePaul’s extensive connections to Chicago’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. Many entrepreneurs join after participating in other programs run by the Coleman center or the college.
Shaw got involved thanks to one such connection. In 2025, Bort and his MBA students participated in DePaul’s ongoing partnership with the Chicago Transit Authority. As part of that project, they heard directly from community stakeholders in Chicago’s Roseland neighborhood. One of those stakeholders, Greater Roseland Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Andrea Reed, put Shaw in touch with Bort.
Bort saw a chance to integrate his research on start-up employees with the Coleman center’s programming.
“With programs like the Coleman internship program, we have a unique and amazing opportunity to blend research and practice,” said Bort. “That really excited me as someone with an entrepreneurial background, both as an early-stage employee and a founder myself.”
“Figuring it out together”: Kaarunya Venisetty’s internship experience
With Bort’s encouragement, Shaw joined the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center internship program. This summer, she was paired with Kaarunya Venisetty, a finance and accounting major.
Venisetty is passionate about entrepreneurship. She’s competed in multiple pitch competitions hosted by the Coleman center. Her freshman year, she won an audience choice award for a program that would mitigate food waste on campuses.
Working with Venisetty gave Shaw the chance to streamline her day-to-day operations. Venisetty handled customer communications and tracked invoicing. With Venisetty’s help, monthly invoices increased by 20%.
“Her ability to keep me on track with expenses and customers’ follow-up gave me a clear picture of where my business was thriving, and where improvements were needed,” Shaw said. “That sort of support was invaluable because it allowed me to focus on growing my business instead of getting lost in the administrative details.”
Venisetty created renderings that helped Shaw bring her vision for a cafe location to life
Venisetty was also tasked with helping Shaw flesh out her vision for Wake, Bake, and Heal’s new home. She spent the summer teaching herself 2D and 3D modeling software. Early on, she used AI to translate Shaw’s vision into an image she could bring to Shaw to ensure she was on the right track.
“I was so nervous at first,” said Venisetty. “And Tasha was also new. We had to figure it out together. I was helping her; she was helping me.”
For interns, a front-row seat to entrepreneurial grit
Venisetty’s experience reflects much of what Bort’s research reveals about startup employment. Working at a startup gives students firsthand exposure to the difficult, creative work of bringing a founder’s vision to life. In this fast-evolving environment, even entry-level team members can influence how a business changes as it grows.
When Venisetty thinks about her internship experience, she thinks about the communications skills she gained. She thinks about the chance she got to try an entirely new skill: figuring out something together with a business owner.
What stands out most to her, though, is the firsthand look she got at what it takes to be an entrepreneur.
“I loved the fact that [Shaw] was a woman who solely owns the business,” said Venisetty. “Food is not easy. It’s not easy to make; it’s not easy to impress people. But whenever I saw [Shaw] working, I felt like she was someone who was born to be in the business.”
Further reading
Bort, J. (2025) “A Theory of the Start-up Workforce.” Academy of Management Review.
https://blogs.depaul.edu/business-exchange/2025/05/27/cta-collaboration-entrepreneurship-roseland/
https://blogs.depaul.edu/entrepreneurship-depaul/2025/03/11/why-start-up-experience-matters-for-todays-students/
by Meredith Carroll | Nov 12, 2025 | College News, Student Stories
As higher education faces new challenges, retaining students has become more important than ever.
It’s also more complicated than it seems.
In an increasingly digital world, how do you meet students where they’re at? How do you ensure they know how to access much-needed resources? How do you smooth over the often-rocky transition between high school and college, or college and career?
Those are the kinds of questions that inspired Jaclyn Jensen, Monika Gunty, and Pam Schilling to launch Driehaus’s new Rising Sophomore Success Program (RSSP).
Jensen serves as Driehaus’s Associate Dean of Undergraduate Programs; Gunty, as the college’s Director of Undergraduate Advising. Schilling is the founder of Archer Career, which creates e-learning career programs. She’s also an alumna of DePaul’s Doctorate in Business Administration program, where her research helped form the foundation for her business.
They focused on the summer between freshman and sophomore year, a time when students are especially likely to transfer or even drop out of college altogether. They expanded the program to include transfer students, who face many of the same challenges — disconnection, uncertainty about where to turn for support — that lead returning students to drop out.
The team also included students from across the university, who brought their expertise in user experience design and artificial intelligence to bear.
This summer’s pilot program was intimate, bringing together 10 students for an up-close look at the experiences, worries, and hopes that rising sophomores bring to the table.
It laid the groundwork for the program to expand — not just in size but potentially to other areas as well.
The pilot program earned support from DePaul’s Vincentian Endowment Fund. This fall, the team’s efforts secured a prestigious Illinois Innovation Grant to take the project to the next level. Among their hopes: to build a model that could scale to other universities, positioning DePaul as a leading innovator in retention and career readiness.
In keeping with the team’s ambitions, the RSSP yielded a wealth of insights. How do you combine technology with a human touch? How do you meet students where they are at without losing touch with the norms of the working world? How do you rethink education, particularly how it happens, and where?
Read on for some of those insights, straight from RSSP team members and participants.
Pam Schilling (DBA ’19)
Meet students where they’re at — and take them where they want to go
“When it comes to career education, we’re competing with platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit,” explained Schilling.
An experienced technology executive and career coach, Schilling founded her company, Archer Career, with that central insight in mind.
Archer applies a learning strategy called “microlearning.” What once might have been a 45-minute video becomes a series of short clips. Videos are supplemented with hands-on, experiential activities and reflection questions.
All of it is designed with an understanding of the information ecosystem that today’s students inhabit.
“Because of the internet, people have a much bigger base of knowledge,” Schilling said. “You can look things up; you can accelerate your learning. Now with AI, this is exponentially greater.”
Schilling also sees her work as a bridge between the norms students are used to and the norms and expectations they’ll face as they enter their workforce.
“It’s about having some sensibility of what we need to adapt to,” Schilling said. “The content has to be interesting. But it also has to have a foot in the professional world. We are bridging from the world of college into the world of work. And that’s a delicate balance.”
Basmah Husain (BUS ’28)
Right skills, right place, right time
Using Schilling’s microlearning approach, the program explored a host of skills. Students learned how to handle stress, practiced time management, set financial goals, and developed their skills as leaders.
For transfer student Basmah Husain, these skills came at a critical time.
In the process of transferring from Oakton Community College to DePaul, Husain confronted a host of uncertainties. How would she navigate classes? How would she stay organized? How could she start preparing for her career?
RSSP gave her a framework to work through those questions. It also gave her somewhere to focus her energy.
“I realized that I was worrying about things I didn’t need to worry about,” she said. “As long as I got the planning part down,” she realized, “I would be fine.”
Today, Husain feels at home at DePaul. She attributes part of that to the community that RSSP brought together.
“It was really nice to have this community of people where I feel like I’m seen and heard,” she said. “It was really nice to see that there are people out there who are willing to take their time to help me. They were there for me when I needed it.”
Khizer Khan (CDM, CSH, ’27)
The unexpected nuances of developing soft skills
Khizer Khan is a math and computer science double major with a minor in finance. He worked for the program as a “secret shopper,” testing it out and identifying areas for improvement.
“I went into the program thinking I would know these skills because I’m an upperclassman,” he said. “That went out the door pretty quickly.”
For Khan, the biggest takeaway was just how much goes into developing — and applying — soft skills.
“People often don’t realize that soft skills aren’t just one skill,” he reflected. “It’s a bunch of things combined. If you want to have leadership, you need to have collaboration. You need to know how to talk to people; you need to know how to get people together and build teams.”
As a transfer student himself, Khan sees particular value in these resources reaching students early in their college careers.
“If this program was my introduction to DePaul, I think I would have been even better off,” he said. “There are so many lessons to learn; there are so many opportunities.”
Gargi Agarwal (CDM MS ’27)
Where mentorship experience and AI tools meet
Gargi Agarwal got to combine her experience as a mentor with her expertise in artificial intelligence
Each student in the program was paired with two mentors. One was a DePaul alum working in industry. The other was peer mentor Gargi Agarwal.
Agarwal is a student in DePaul’s M.S. in Artificial Intelligence program. She joined the RSSP as an experienced mentor; she helped train new employees in her previous role at Qualcomm and served as student body president in college.
In her job with the RSSP, Agarwal found an unexpected opportunity to combine her ethos as a mentor with her technological savvy.
She set up biweekly Zoom calls with program participants, keeping detailed notes about their summer jobs, their family milestones, and anything else that might affect how learning fits into their lives.
These calls, she realized, provided valuable data. How quickly a student responded to her emails; how nervous or confident they were in what they’d learned — all of this data could help home in on students who might need extra support.
Agarwal built a predictive model to do just that. With such a small sample size, her model will need refinement before it’s ready to be deployed. Still, Agarwal’s model creates further opportunities to scale the program without losing its personalized focus.
It’s also given Agarwal invaluable hands-on experience.
“With this project, I was able to use my AI skills for the first time,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting that. We were able to see the results; we were able to get predictions. Now I have knowledge about AI and predictive models, and I learned it hands-on.”
Ilse Castellanos Pulido (CDM MS ’26)
Balancing technology and personal connection
Ilse Castellanos Pulido brought her expertise in user experience design to her work as an intern on the project
Ilse Castellanos Pulido worked closely with Agarwal. Castellanos Pulido brought her expertise as an M.S. in Human-Computer Interaction student to the table.
“I was thinking about this project from the perspective of a user experience designer,” she said. “How do students perceive this as their first touch point with the university? How do they evolve during the program? What patterns emerge in their behavior, and how can we design interventions that feel supportive rather than intrusive?”
Together with Agarwal, Castellanos Pulido focused on building a system of personalized “nudges.” Through user research and behavioral analysis, AI allowed Castellanos Pulido to observe each student’s login habits, then send encouraging messages at the times they were most likely to log in.
It’s this feature — the intersection between technology and personalization — that sums up the program for Castellanos Pulido.
“Having this balance between technology and personal connection made this experience more meaningful,” she said. “We validated our designs with real students and measured the impact. With this internship, I was able to prove to myself that you can apply human-centered design in the education field. We can build something special.”
Pam Schilling (DBA ’19)
Rethinking the college — and career — journey
When Pam Schilling talks about what she hopes to accomplish with RSSP and programs like it, she returns to the idea of college and career alike as a single, cohesive journey.
“Everything you do in college is cumulative. And fundamentally, I have a point of view that college is not just about the courses and the content,” she said.
So often, she added, “we don’t look at the job search as a process. We look at it as this random chain of events that you don’t have a lot of control over.”
Programs like RSSP — by equipping students, early on, with skills that are equally valuable in the classroom and the workplace — seek to change that.
In the process, Schilling believes such programs have the power to transform higher education.
“The thing we did with the rising sophomore program is that we’re not just putting the burden on one area of DePaul,” she said. “It’s not a career services problem. It’s not a faculty problem. It’s not an academic success problem. We really had the opportunity to centralize problem solving.”
by Meredith Carroll | Nov 12, 2025 | Faculty Focus
When Clinical Professor of Economics Thomas Walker worked in industry just three years ago, AI was barely a topic of conversation.
Today, discussions about AI are everywhere. Businesses are incorporating AI into their offerings and their workflows. Entry-level analyst positions, once a mainstay for fresh business school grads, are at risk.
At the same time, uncertainty abounds. How much of the conversation around AI is signal and how much is noise? If this much has changed in less time than it takes to finish a bachelor’s degree, what might the world look like three years from now?
“Trying to stay in touch with something that’s changing so fast is a tricky thing to do,” said Walker. “But we’re focused on building a framework that helps students adapt and apply what they learn as the technology evolves — that helps them be resilient no matter what comes next.”
In a changing world, AI helps meet students where they’re at
As AI became a household term, work was already underway to reimagine DePaul’s MBA program. Aligning the program with the cutting edge in industry was one guiding precept; each core class now includes a hands-on project in partnership with a real-world company or nonprofit.
Aligning the program with the expectations of today’s students was another.
Some students arrive straight from undergrad; others, after several years in the workforce. Many are career switchers.
Incorporating AI makes it possible to tailor a business education to students’ increasingly varied experience levels and interests.
Walker teaches a foundational course in business analytics tools. The concepts he teaches can be abstract, but AI helps students connect these concepts to specific use cases.
Professor of Economics Rafael Tenorio does something similar in his Strategic Management Foundations class, another core course in the MBA program. When he teaches different business models, he tasks students with using AI to find real-world examples of those models.
“It empowers the students to participate,” he said. “It helps me illustrate the concept; it fills in gaps.”
Program pairs new skills with time-tested fundamentals
Like many of the core courses in DePaul’s MBA, the version of Walker’s business analytics tools class that he’s teaching this quarter is new. AI wasn’t the reason for curricular changes across the MBA. But it has shifted Walker’s thinking about what business education looks like in 2025, and how to deliver it.
A previous version of the class centered on three exams that Walker used to break down tricky, technical skills. Now, like other core courses across the MBA, the class is project-based. The emphasis isn’t just on practicing skills in isolation. Instead, it’s on understanding how to apply skills in complicated, real-world contexts.
“The more I think about AI, the more I think of it as a framework for discovery — for trying to answer big questions,” Walker said. “We really try to belabor the point that step number one of business analytics isn’t learning some program or software. It’s asking the right questions. It’s knowing where to start.”
For Tenorio, like Walker, grappling with AI has led him to return to the fundamentals — in Tenorio’s case, of the discipline of economics itself.
“What I want is for students to treat AI as a complement, not a substitute,” Tenorio said. “It can do boilerplate research for you in a fraction of a second. It can remind you of the fundamental things you should consider when trying to solve a strategic problem. But you don’t get brilliant, quirky solutions with AI. We still need to augment it with human insight.”
Experiences offer insights for future-proofing education and industry alike
How do you future-proof a business education, whether you’re in academia or industry? How do you brace for further changes in an already-changing world?
Tenorio’s and Walker’s experiences with reenvisioning the MBA classroom in the age of AI suggest that it goes something like this: You leverage new tools, whatever they are, to expand the range of material that is available to you. You focus on equipping students with frameworks that help them adapt to – or even get ahead of – change, whether that’s today’s new tools or innovations we can’t yet picture.
“That looks like working together on teams, asking good questions, finding the real problem that a business has — even finding problems they don’t know they had,” Walker said. “It looks like pushing the boundaries, moving the company forward, and setting better goals and objectives. Our MBA students get hands-on experience using AI to do just that. And our program is designed to continue doing that, even as technology evolves.”
by Sulin Ba | May 27, 2025 | Notes from the Dean
Dear alumni and friends of DePaul’s Driehaus College of Business:
Welcome to the spring 2025 issue of the Business Exchange!
Dean of the Driehaus College of Business Sulin Ba converses with CTA representatives at the March 7 poster presentation
This year has been full of exciting news at Driehaus.
Our students and faculty are partnering with the CTA to imagine how entrepreneurs can revitalize communities.
They’re working with the sixth largest privately held company in America to find the insights hidden in data.
And they’re charting the hidden landscape of affordable housing in Chicago, g
iving communities valuable tools to advocate for their needs.
There are a few principles that unify these projects.
- A Driehaus education has a purpose: Guided by expert faculty, our students are jumping straight into the real world. They’re wading through complications and complexity. And they’re getting to see their ideas and insights make a real difference.
- A Driehaus education has an impact: Our students and researchers bring a fresh perspective to the challenges, large and small, that businesses face today. Our partnerships are win/win opportunities for the organizations we partner with and our students alike.
- A Driehaus education couldn’t happen anywhere else: Each of these projects originated with one of the many personal connections that knit Driehaus and Chicago together. At a time when so much about education is changing, these stories attest to the enduring value of the personal, place-based connections that make Driehaus Chicago’s business school.
In this issue, you’ll also read the stories of two alumni who are leaders in their respective fields.
- On April 10, I sat down with alumnus and CEO Julian Francis (MBA ’96) for our second Executive Speaker Series. Our conversation provided a unique window into what it’s like to lead a Fortune 500 company in a uniquely fast-paced industry – and how managing people is critical to success.
- Last fall, I was proud to hear that Jenny Ciszewski (BUS ’02) — a partner at Deloitte and the first female president of our accounting donor society Ledger & Quill — was named among the Most Influential Bay Area Women in Business. In this issue, you’ll hear how her philosophies of leadership and giving back intersect.
Both Julian and Jenny attest to the enduring impact of DePaul’s Vincentian mission. Our alumni lead not just with skill but with compassion. And they – you – are more effective leaders for it.
Sincerely,
Sulin Ba, PhD
Dean, Driehaus College of Business
DePaul University
by Meredith Carroll | May 27, 2025 | Features, Student Stories
MBA students harnessed entrepreneurship to envision revitalization
A hub where pet owners can gather to meet neighbors. Urban agriculture using recycled water. Incubators for entrepreneurs and makers.
These were just a few of the projects that MBA students, led by Assistant Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship James Bort, proposed for a South Side community this winter quarter as part of DePaul’s partnership with the Chicago Transit Authority.
Writ large, the partnership harnesses entrepreneurship to drive economic growth on the South Side in conjunction with the agency’s historic Red Line Extension.
Students’ project proposals are the first step towards that larger goal. They demonstrate how entrepreneurs can capitalize on this massive investment in infrastructure, setting off a cycle of revitalization. To a much-needed infrastructure project, these projects bring entrepreneurial imagination.
“Entrepreneurship is fundamentally an imagined reality,” said Bort. “It’s about storytelling. It’s about your ability to be optimistic and empathetic.”
In collaboration with the CTA, focusing on a community with promise
The class focused their efforts on a once-booming stretch of South Michigan Avenue in Roseland.
CTA Director of Diversity Programs JuanPablo Prieto explained the factors that led to that decision.
“For every dollar we invest in transit, we get $4 in economic return,” he said. “We want the communities where we’re making these investments to benefit from that return.”
The CTA commissioned a transit-supported development study on the area, engaging extensively with community members. Students delved into that research.
With Prieto’s help, they also heard directly from community stakeholders. The head of the Chamber of Commerce came to speak. So did the local alderman’s chief of staff.
Stakeholder interviews ensured that students’ projects were grounded in the needs of the community.
“We moved from studying the history of Roseland to understanding who’s there today and what they need,” Bort said. “Only then did we move into ideation.”
Informed by stakeholders, projects focus on empowering local entrepreneurs
Stefanie Slager, center, at the class’ poster presentation
On March 7, students shared their visions at a packed poster presentation. Faculty, staff, and students attended. So did CTA officials and community stakeholders.
“We were blown away by the thought, the intentionality, and the care that went into the listening sessions with the stakeholders,” said Prieto. “Each project had some element of what the stakeholders brought to the table.”
MBA student Stefanie Slager’s team shared a plan for a “living lab” for new entrepreneurs. There, they hoped, local founders and makers could launch businesses that would attract visitors to the neighborhood – especially in culinary arts, entertainment, fashion, and business innovation.
A box of fresh donuts sat on a table next to Slager. She’d picked them up that morning from Old Fashioned Donuts, an iconic 50-year-old, family-owned shop in Roseland: an example of the community’s existing strength and potential.
“When I went in on the day of the presentation, you could tell that everyone kind of knows each other,” Slager said. “How blessed are we to work with this community and hopefully make a difference? It is our goal for Roseland to again become the jewel of the South Side.”
A few groups over, MBA student Keiph Oliver and his team presented their plan. Like Slager’s group, they envisioned an entrepreneurial ecosystem – one that would equip residents with tools and resources to realize their own visions for the community.
“We want to create programs that bring businesses into high schools,” creating mentorships and job opportunities, explained Oliver. Exposing youth to a wide range of career paths was a priority.
“Exposure affects what someone believes they could be,” he said. “They don’t know what skills they already have. They don’t know how those skills could transfer.”
Looking ahead to the next phase of the DePaul-CTA partnership
Dean of the Driehaus College of Business Sulin Ba converses with CTA representatives at the March 7 poster presentation
In future phases of the DePaul-CTA collaboration, some students will partner directly with local businesses. Others will pick up where Bort’s winter quarter class left off, bringing select projects one step closer to reality.
For Bort, the projects attest to the vital role entrepreneurship plays in community renewal.
“Entrepreneurship is one of the most important elements for a community to succeed,” Bort said. “You need entrepreneurs working outside of the box, or working with resource constraints, figuring out how to make it happen.”
And, he added, you need initial investments in infrastructure to give those entrepreneurs a place to start.
“Without infrastructure, you really don’t have anything,” Bort added. “People have been fighting for this Red Line Extension for 50 years. What an exciting time to have been here for it.”
Prieto echoed Bort’s sentiments.
“I want to reiterate CTA’s commitment to this project,” he said. “This was a promise that was made more than 50 years ago to this community. We are committed to delivering on that promise. And we are excited to go down this path with the community as we not only build the extension but support the development that will come with it.”
For students, a lesson in the power of place and purpose
Another lesson of the project? The power of place, in all its specificity: whether that place is Chicago, Roseland, or DePaul.
Oliver is a graduate of DePaul’s film program who plans, empowered by his DePaul MBA, to one day launch his own production company.
“A lot of what I think about as a filmmaker is Hollywood,” he said. “The entertainment industry found a city and set up shop. It created this entire infrastructure that, for a long time, had no competition.
“How do we create an infrastructure like that for Chicago? What does that look like? In my lifetime, can I not only create a company, but can I contribute to generating a higher standard and a better business infrastructure? One that will bring more jobs and allow people to stay here?”
From Bort’s perspective, the collaboration is uniquely suited to DePaul.
“We have this Vincentian mission. When we see an opportunity to help, we jump in. That’s our default,” Bort said. “How does a DePaul grad stand out? Things like this, maybe. There are pro-social elements; there are human-centered design elements, empathy elements. It’s really tangible. It’s hands-in-the-dirt. And you’re working together to figure it out.”
by Meredith Carroll | May 27, 2025 | Features, Student Stories
Capstone class “challenges the status quo” of learning
When the co-directors of DePaul’s M.S. in Business Analytics program, Khadija Ali Vakeel and Sina Ansari, embarked on rethinking the program’s capstone last year, they knew they wanted it to center on a collaboration with real-world companies.
This approach promised to set students up for success in industry. But it also posed challenges. Real-world datasets are often messy. Clear answers aren’t guaranteed. Distilling insights from data is as much art as it is science, demanding storytelling skills as well as analytical savvy.
In a word, the setup for the M.S. in Business Analytics capstone “challenges the status quo” of how most classes are taught, according to Vakeel.
“Students lead their own projects,” she said. “Students pose their own questions and find their own answers, supported by the instructor and industry partners. They are discovering things. It pushes them to think about their own creativity and storytelling as well as analysis — all in a very compact time of 10 weeks.”
Students offer companies a fresh perspective
Vakeel and Ansari launched the new, hands-on version of the capstone project in spring 2024. That year, with the help of a third-party mediator, Altheon AI, the program collaborated with Skyline Design and Valqari.
In fall 2024, the program began collaborating with Reyes Holdings, a food and beverage distributor that is the sixth largest privately held company by revenue in the U.S. according to a list compiled by Forbes. That collaboration has continued ever since.
Reyes has a vast logistics network with a trove of data to match. Powered by AI, cameras in truck cabs collect virtually every kind of data imaginable. Are drivers eating or texting while they drive? Are they leaving an adequate stopping distance?
Most of all, Reyes wanted to know, how effective were its coaching programs? What could it do to make its operations safer — and bring down costs in the process?
The company had in-house experts to answer those questions. But it also needed a fresh perspective.
That’s where DePaul students came in.
“The students have so much energy,” said Vakeel. “They think outside the box. When employees of the company are looking at the same data day in and day out, they might not be able to see what a fresh perspective from students can bring in.”
The power of data — from unearthing hidden stories to driving strategy
The winning team poses with faculty and corporate partners from Reyes Holdings.
The brief for the project was intentionally open-ended. Student groups could choose which variables to look at, how to analyze them, and how to put them in context.
In capstone instructor Nidhal Bouazizi’s words, the project offered an invitation to “get a little messy with the data.”
“We were just given this dataset and the objective to enhance driver safety. There were no other real guidelines,” said Nithya Abraham, one of the students in Bouazizi’s latest winter quarter class. “That wasn’t because of our professor; that was the nature of the project. You have to play with the dataset and figure things out on your own.”
For Abraham’s class, that dataset was an intimidating file spanning over 100 columns and nearly 300,000 rows. Ongoing guidance from Bouazizi helped the student teams refine their approach. So did representatives from Reyes Holdings, who worked closely with the class throughout the term.
Some teams analyzed how factors like time and location affected risky behaviors. Others, including Abraham’s, looked at the firm’s coaching programs, comparing their effectiveness across different subsidiaries around the country.
Often, the hardest part wasn’t sifting through data fields or crafting complicated predictive models. It was figuring out how to chart a course through the data that could lead to an actionable recommendation.
In that choice lay a key lesson of the capstone project: Data is only as useful as the recommendations distilled from it.
“We could have gone and talked about a thousand things, but we stuck to focusing on preventing near-collision events to align with the cost-saving objective,” said student Alyssa Kozal. “We wanted to make a strong recommendation. And I think that made our presentation strong too.”
Or, as Bouazizi put it: “recommendations are how you monetize the data.” Recommendations — and the narratives that connect recommendations directly to the data.
Ultimately, the story of the M.S. in Business Analytics capstone project isn’t merely about students’ considerable technical expertise, or even their creativity and drive in applying it to real-world scenarios. It’s about the power of connecting statistics to strategy — and about what happens when students get the chance to think like a leader.
Kozal and her teammates, Malika Diwakar and Srushti Summanwar, were among a select few teams who got the chance to present their findings directly to executives from Reyes Holdings.
“It was important to us to have a storyline,” said Diwakar. “Who are we? What was our objective in this process? We really focused” — inspired by guidance from Bouazizi, she added — “on explaining our entire thought process, beginning to end.”
That’s part of what the capstone class gives students, said Vakeel: the ability to tell stories not just about the data, but about the process of sifting through it. The ability, in that way, to connect a company’s operations on the ground now to its strategy moving forward.
“I’m not someone who can sit at a screen for eight hours coding,” said Abraham. “What I do enjoy is looking at datasets, drawing insights from them, and making recommendations based on those insights. The capstone solidified that this is what I like doing. This is where I want to build my career.”
For students and companies alike, the capstone opens up new possibilities
Business analytics is a growing field. Bouazizi and Vakeel cite a number of students who leveraged their capstone experience to secure internships. One of Bouazizi’s students even landed a full-time role working for a manufacturer of AI-equipped cameras like the ones Reyes uses.
“This hands-on experience puts our students at a huge competitive advantage,” said Bouazizi. “We’re not providing you with a case study somebody wrote. This is the real deal.”
This spring, the program will partner with LabelMaster in addition to Reyes. That will give students the opportunity to pick a project that aligns with their career goals. It will also, Vakeel stressed, be just as beneficial for industry partners as it is for students.
“I’d say that this is a call to action to Chicago-based companies who want to partner with us,” said Vakeel. “We are open to such strategic partnerships, and we would welcome them in the future.”
“The responsibility involved in these projects is very high,” she added. “But the students have made us proud. It is a win-win situation—for DePaul, for our students, and for the companies.”
by Meredith Carroll | May 27, 2025 | Alumni Profiles
The Driehaus alumna and first female president of Ledger & Quill was recently recognized as one of the Most Influential Women in Bay Area Business
For Jenny Ciszewski (BUS ’02), being a leader means understanding how work fits into the full scope of people’s lives — including her own.
“I try to make sure people know that I want them to be the best version of themselves when they come to work,” she said. “And that means they need to have time for whatever they prioritize in life [outside of work].”
Ciszewski is a partner at Deloitte, where in addition to serving her clients, she also leads the audit & assurance marketplace strategy which focuses on growing the business nationally. Last year, she was named among the Most Influential Women in Bay Area Business by the San Francisco Business Times.
“Having done a minor in women’s studies at DePaul, it’s something that’s always been near and dear to my heart to have more women leaders in business,” she said. “Getting nominated and being honored in such a way was a full-circle moment.”
Putting priorities into practice – and integrating work and life
As a partner at one of the “Big Four” accounting firms, Ciszewski is a trailblazer. While the industry has made strides in recent decades, women are still underrepresented in leadership roles. That’s changing, Ciszewski is quick to note. But it’s a change that takes time.
It’s also a change that involves reimagining how work and life fit together.
“In our profession, and especially in audit, you have to manage work-life integration,” she said. “When I became a mom for the first time as a senior manager, I took it upon myself to mentor other first-time moms. I want to make sure that people understand that they can be super successful in this profession and super successful in their life as a parent.”
Parenthood is far from the only responsibility that people need to balance with work. Work-life integration, Ciszewski noted, isn’t even about responsibility, per se — it might just as easily be about a favorite sport, or a concert, or a marathon training schedule.
But there is something about parenthood in general — and motherhood, with its attendant cultural pressures, in particular — that throws the question of work-life integration into stark relief. The formative moments of childhood cannot always be planned in advance, nor rescheduled to make way for other priorities.
After she made partner, Ciszewski had the chance to work with an executive coach as part of Deloitte’s ongoing professional development.
“Those sessions really helped to clarify for me that, as a leader, my top priority is my family,” she said. “It’s being there for my three daughters.”
Prioritizing family can still be accomplished while meeting and exceeding your goals at work, she stressed. It’s an ever-changing balance: one that requires letting go of the pressure that many mothers, in particular, feel to prioritize parenting at all times.
“I don’t get so caught up in if I miss something of theirs because I’m traveling for work,” Ciszewski said. “I don’t feel a lot of guilt because my career is enabling them to do what matters to them. If I’m there most of the time — if they feel supported by me and my husband — that’s what matters.”
A DePaul upbringing – and a legacy of support for women
Ciszewski’s dad was that supportive and influential figure in her life. His mother marched for women’s suffrage and worked as an English professor at a time when few women worked outside the home.
“My dad came from a very pro-female background,” Ciszewski said. “He taught my sisters and I to change the oil in our cars and encouraged us to play sports of all kinds. He always wanted us to know that we could do whatever we wanted in life— even if it seemed like a male-dominated area.’”
With his support, Ciszewski and her three siblings pursued higher education. For Ciszewski and her sister Stacy Janiak, now a member of DePaul’s Board of Trustees, that meant attending DePaul.
“I received a full scholarship to DePaul through Ledger and Quill,” DePaul’s alumni donor society for the School of Accounting and MIS, Ciszewski said. “I wouldn’t be where I’m at today without that. My dad was a letter carrier and my mom was a stay-at-home mom caring for the four kids; I made more my first year as an auditor than he did after forty years working at the post office.”
Her time at DePaul reinforced the importance of giving back. As a student, she participated in service trips over spring break. She also tutored children every week at Visitation Academy in Englewood. After graduation, she served on the Ledger & Quill Board, including serving as its female president from 2009 to 2011.
As for today, Ciszewski and her husband recently established a scholarship that will support female students in accounting. The scholarship honors her father, who passed away from pancreatic cancer in 2016.
“To honor him in that way was so special,” she said. “I really feel that I wouldn’t be where I am today without the education that I received at DePaul— and without people who I don’t even know, who gave those funds for my scholarships. They had a huge impact on my life and my ability to get a degree and do well in the world. And hopefully, we can do the same for others.”
A full-circle moment
Establishing the Peter Babiak Memorial Scholarship was a full-circle moment for Ciszewski. So, too, was being honored as one of the Bay Area’s Most Influential Women in Business.
When she crossed the stage at the awards ceremony, she had the chance to answer one of several prompts. She chose the one that asked her to share what she is most proud of.
“When I got up there, I said that I’m most proud of being an incredible mom,” she said. “It’s ultimately what matters at the end of the day: that I’m doing right by how I raise them.”
For Ciszewski, it’s one and the same as doing right by the people she leads at work — and all the leaders, women especially, who are coming up behind her.
by Meredith Carroll | May 27, 2025 | Scholarly Pursuits
Consider the intersection between housing market forces and finding a place to live: decades-long cycles play out alongside human-scale stories, each with their own role to play in shaping a city.
That intersection is where the Institute for Housing Studies (IHS) does its work.
Housed in DePaul’s Driehaus College of Business, IHS digs into the data to unearth the hidden trends shaping Chicago’s housing market. The institute partners with community groups and policymakers, providing data-driven tools that help make affordable housing accessible to the populations that need it most.
All of this gives IHS a unique vantage point into the stories hidden within Chicago’s housing landscape. Read on for some takeaways about the past, present, and future of affordable housing in Chicago from IHS Executive Director Geoff Smith.
The mystery of the disappearing two– and four-flats
When many people hear affordable housing, said Smith, they picture federally and locally subsidized programs.
For most low-income renters and homeowners, that’s not the case.
Instead, most affordable housing is so-called “naturally occurring.” That is, it’s affordable because it’s older, or located in a neighborhood with fewer resources and amenities.
Naturally occurring affordable housing is a broad category, defined as much by what it’s not (subsidized or regulated) as what it is.
Within that category, it turns out, the specifics matter.
A community group in Albany Park reached out to IHS with a phenomenon they’d noticed: two– and four-flat buildings in the neighborhood were disappearing.
Subsequent work revealed that such buildings were disappearing citywide — and that their decline correlated directly with the loss of affordable housing writ large.
The loss of two– and four-flats looked different in different parts of the city. In neighborhoods where land values were going up, new buyers were opting to tear them down in favor of single-family housing.
In neighborhoods with a history of systemic disinvestment, meanwhile, population loss meant that many two– and four-flats were falling into disrepair. And, when these buildings were demolished, they weren’t being rebuilt.
Particularly in these parts of the city, the loss of two– and four-flats didn’t just signify a reduction in the amount of affordable housing on offer. It signified the loss of a specific type of affordable housing, one with specific advantages.
“[These buildings offer] an opportunity to defray the costs by renting out the other units,” Smith said. “They offer the opportunity for multigenerational housing.”
“As you lose that kind of housing, you erode the housing options,” Smith continued. “You lose the opportunity to create new homeowners.”
Reimagining housing ownership, one data point at a time
If the landscape of affordable housing is varied and particular, then affordable housing interventions are too.
“There’s not one silver bullet strategy,” explained Smith. Scaling back restrictions on new development can help, he said, but that’s only true in neighborhoods where land and property values have been high enough, and for long enough, to justify the risk of investing in new construction.
One approach could involve working with landlords who want to sell their properties – particularly long-time landlords who own aging housing stock, which makes up a significant proportion of housing in Chicago.
“What kind of programs or incentives might you need to convince owners to keep the property without selling?” said Smith. “Are there ownership models that might exist where the owner could sell their property to a mission-oriented entity that would keep it relatively affordable?”
One such option, Smith said, is a community land trust. Such trusts hold the land that housing is located on, bringing ownership of housing itself within closer reach. Across the city, the IHS partners with groups that are experimenting with this model. Just last year, Smith served on a statewide task force that studied community land trusts, laying the foundation for implementation on a wider scale.
In an uncertain future, a vital role for applied research
On a local level, community land trusts are one example of a promising tool to preserve and expand access to affordable housing.
Implementing such programs, however, is slow going. And, on a national level, the future of affordable housing writ large is profoundly uncertain.
Federal programs have historically played a major role in expanding access to housing. What might happen if they’re scaled back?
“The one thing I can say is that, in times of volatility and uncertainty, having in-depth information on the market is more important than ever,” said Smith. “It increases the need to be targeted and strategic in how you deploy limited resources.”
“That’s a big role we play with our data,” he added. “So I’m hopeful that our work will continue to be relevant and useful, whichever direction the next few years take us.”
by jmercha3 | May 27, 2025 | Alumni Profiles
Photos by Sean Campbell, Working Anchor
The house was packed for the Driehaus College of Business’s second annual Executive Speaker Series, held on April 10, 2025. This year’s guest was DePaul MBA (’96) Julian Francis, former CEO of Fortune 500 company Beacon Building Products. In a wide-ranging conversation hosted by Driehaus Dean Sulin Ba, the audience heard about Francis’s leadership journey from student to the C-suite and everything in between, and got an insider’s perspective on how he makes tough decisions in an industry where timing is everything.
In addition to his MBA, Francis also holds a doctorate in materials engineering, which gave him an edge in an industry all about the built environment. He has an extensive record of executive leadership at several different firms, and at Beacon he led the country’s largest, publicly traded distributor of roofing materials and complementary building products.
Francis looked back on his time at DePaul with gratitude. Originally from the U.K., Francis was an international student looking to make his way in an unfamiliar culture. After a period of some uncertainty, he found his home at DePaul. “DePaul took a chance on me,” he related, “and for that I’ll always be grateful.”
After touching on Francis’s fond memories of Chicago and going to school at DePaul in the mid-1990s, Dean Ba and Francis moved on to the topic of leadership in today’s world. In a marketplace crowded with different recipes for leadership success, Francis offered a simple, succinct guiding principle: at the end of the day it is the people you associate with who matter as much, if not more, than ideas.
“I used to think it was all about the ideas, that if you just had that right, the most compelling ideas, then that was all you needed. It would work out,” Francis recounted. “But somewhere along the way I realized it’s not that, it’s the people who matter, the people you support and surround yourself with. Cultivating relationships with the right people is the single most important thing for aspiring leaders.”
Pausing to reflect for a moment, he summed up the evening’s theme: “You’re only a leader if you have followers.”
Leadership is something earned and recognized by others; it is a fundamentally social capacity. It is, in the end, all about the question of values: what do you believe? What do you stand for? Do you demonstrate the values your company professes, and how do you show it?
“Your values are everything,” Francis said. “Do you really believe in the values you claim? What about the people you work with? Do they believe in them, or do they just see them as words on a wall?” In a business environment that grows more uncertain by the day, a firm commitment to one’s values and vision can be a much needed source of stability.
The same can be said for one’s attitude to risk, Francis suggested. “One key lesson I’ve learned over the years is not just to consider the impossible, but to expect it,” he related. “The last thing you want is to be caught flat-footed by something you should have thought of,” he continued. “We can’t take anything for granted. If you always have a contingency plan for the seemingly impossible, then you’re ready for any scenario.”
