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.”
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.
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.”
Middle-of-the-road stances risked alienating allies and opponents alike, research found
How do you navigate political discussions?
You might expect, as many people do, that expressing “two-sided” or ambivalent positions about controversial political issues could help you bridge divides. In particular, you might expect that expressing ambivalence would make you more likeable to allies and opponents alike.
A new study coauthored by DePaul Assistant Professor of Marketing Geoff Durso found exactly the opposite. Expressing ambivalence was not only unhelpful when it came to winning over opponents on contentious issues. It also hurt study subjects’ standing among those on the same side of the issue at hand.
As a marketing professor with a background in psychology, Durso often works at the intersection of consumer behavior and political sentiment.
Read on for a discussion of why the study’s results surprised him, what might explain the findings, and how insights from marketing and politics can inform each other.
Or: Watch a video version of the interview on our YouTube channel, part of an ongoing series highlighting Driehaus faculty and what their research can teach us about the world around us.
On politics as identity
Driehaus College of Business (DCOB): What were your expectations going into this study? Did it surprise you to find that expressing ambivalence didn’t help — or in some cases even hurt — people’s likeability?
Geoff Durso (GD): People generally like others who share their position. Then, if you think of people who disagree with you, it seemed reasonable to predict that expressing conflict in your own position might communicate some degree of respect or credence to your opponents’ position at the same time. So when it comes to both groups, you might expect that expressing two-sided opinions would be beneficial to people’s popularity, a sort of middle ground that everyone respected. But we find precisely the opposite pattern.
My so-called position allies — those who agree with me on an issue — don’t like that I’m conflicted at all. They don’t like that I’m rocking the boat. And to my opponents, expressing conflict doesn’t matter, because I’m against them on the overall position. It doesn’t even register that I feel conflicted, or that my position acknowledges both sides.
DCOB: How did you go about making sense of those results? Why do you think that was the case?
GD: The way people think of each other is increasingly polarized. And what’s really interesting about that is that, sometimes, an issue position can become a group identity.
Say, during the pandemic, I’m pro-mask mandate. But, I express conflict about it. I’m weakening the pro-mask mandate connection among my allies. And when it comes to an anti-mask mandate person, they consider me part of an outgroup “opponent” due to our larger disagreement on mask mandate policies.
In other words, the nuances in my position don’t even register to opponents. And the same nuance makes my allies feel less connected to me.
On the connections between marketing and politics
DCOB: Some folks might be surprised to hear that a marketing professor researches political discourse. What do these two fields have in common?
GD: I tell my students to think of politics as the marketing of a vote. You might have a dollar and you can give that dollar to any company (or candidate!) based on what products or positions they sell. Likewise, you can also give your vote to a candidate that represents what you want versus the other candidate. Both actions represent consumer behavior. It’s just the currency that varies.
In other words, a marketplace is not just money, and it’s not just buying things. You can think more generally in terms of choices and decisions between many options in the marketplace. That’s what every marketing campaign has in common, whether it’s toothpaste brands or presidential candidates. The stakes vary, but the underlying marketing processes are similar.
On where to go from here
DCOB: Any takeaways from your study results that you think marketers should be paying attention to?
GD: There’s more and more demand from consumers for brands to make sociopolitical kinds of statements. Our findings suggest that being two-sided about these is going to repel a lot of people. Trying to please everyone with a two-sided sociopolitical statement may simply lead to pleasing no one.
DCOB: What questions has this research left you with? What do you want to understand better about this issue?
GD: A truism of psychology is that we judge other people by their actions, but we judge ourselves by our intentions. Expressing ambivalence in our own sociopolitical position may feel personally right (we intend to bridge political divides) but we fail to appreciate how this would be perceived in reality – we may seem inconsistent or waffling, for instance.
How do you get people to change their expectations around expressing ambivalence? How do you get them to shift away from being focused on their own intentions? Are there ways to generate win-win consensus on divisive sociopolitical issues, and how best to do so? That’s what I’d like to learn a bit more about in my future work.
Driehaus researchers shed light on weight-based mistreatment in the workplace
Research can be pathbreaking in any number of ways. It can distill received wisdom — or upend it. It can organize existing knowledge or chart a new course forward.
Or, like a paper recently published by four Driehaus researchers, research can put a name to something at once widely experienced and seldom discussed. Mistreatment in the workplace based on weight is an unfortunately familiar fact for those who experience it. But it’s rarely talked about: not among leadership; not in the media; and not even, thanks to shame and stigma, among those who are harmed by it.
“We wanted to study something that is real,” said Jaclyn Jensen, a professor and the associate dean for student success at Driehaus, and one of the study’s authors. “We wanted to shed light on something important that we think people are overlooking.”
Jensen
Kuljanin
Lemmon
On why weight-based mistreatment has gone unchecked
Jensen and her coauthors — fellow management and entrepreneurship faculty Grace Lemmon and Goran Kuljanin, along with Doctorate in Business Administration student Renee Chu-Jacoby — published the results of their work in October.
Across two studies, the team found that weight-based mistreatment is as widespread as it is damaging.
In the U.S., for starters, 75% of the workforce counts as “overweight” or “obese.” (That’s according to the Body Mass Index: a widely used measure that is also widely criticized.)
As part of their study, the Driehaus team surveyed 1,008 adults who fell into this category. Among that sample, 758 people — or 75% — had been mistreated at work because of their weight within the past six months.
Together, these numbers sketch the outlines of a pervasive phenomenon, reinforced by widespread cultural stigmas. These stigmas, the researchers speculate, are part of why the problem has gone unchecked for so long.
“In our culture, we believe that if you’re larger, you’re responsible for being larger,” said Lemmon. “Larger bodies are associated with less competency, less warmth, more selfishness.”
“This is a topic that crosses the personal and professional divide,” added Jensen. “We maybe don’t have scripts that tell us whether we should be talking about it at all. Or, if we are, why we’re talking about it. Those guardrails just aren’t there.”
On why weight-based mistreatment can be hard to spot
For those who experience it, weight-based mistreatment is many-faced, many-formed. Jensen, Lemmon, Kuljanin, and Chu-Jacoby worked with a smaller study population to account for the full spectrum of how weight stigma shows up in the workplace.
They surfaced plenty of examples of overt, aggressive mistreatment: name-calling, exclusion, physical harassment. They also found examples of larger-bodied workers being perceived as less competent and less professional: of these workers being denied access to information or roles because of their size.
Just as damaging — and perhaps more surprising to those who haven’t faced it— were seemingly benign comments known as “benevolent mistreatment.”
Benevolent mistreatment might masquerade as concern for a larger-bodied coworker’s well-being. It might manifest as the suggestion to opt for a salad over a sandwich, or the snide remark about too many trips to the candy bowl — all directed at larger-bodied colleagues without being levied at smaller-bodied individuals who make similar choices.
Benevolent mistreatment, the researchers found, was just as damaging as other forms. No matter how overt or covert the behavior targeted at them, study subjects were likely to withdraw from work; to experience rumination and shame; or to neglect selfcare.
“[Benevolent mistreatment is] very much somebody entering your personal space: your personal emotional space; your personal cognitive space,” said Lemmon. “It might not be physical in nature. But it is still somebody trying to get their way into your life and control you. There’s an element of control implicit in benevolent mistreatment that’s not present in the other forms of mistreatment. And I think that’s why people react so strongly.”
On the potential costs to organizations
Weight-based mistreatment at work, the study found, is undeniably detrimental to workers’ mental health.
Equally, allowing weight-based bullying to proceed unchecked can cost organizations.
“It turns out that how people are treated inside organizations affects their behavior,” said Kuljanin. “That’s why I like this line of work. When you mistreat people, you’re clearly not getting the best out of them.”
The team hasn’t yet had the chance to quantify the impact of weight-based mistreatment on organizations. But, given the scale of the problem and existing research in workplace climates, they conjecture that these costs include lost productivity, deteriorating collaboration, and difficulty attracting and retaining talent.
“We’re social creatures,” Kuljanin said. “We talk about each other and gossip all the time. Organizations develop reputations. And so if you’re an organization that has a reputation for this kind of mistreatment, then you’re going to be missing out on a whole bunch of talent.”
On where to go from here
An issue so widespread, the researchers stressed, will necessitate solutions at any number of levels: from organizational culture right through to public policy.
As for what organizations can do? According to the team, existing research suggests that culture changes happen on many fronts. It happens when organizations change their policies. It happens when leaders draw a clear line. And it happens when all workers — but particularly those in positions of power — give one another models of how to act with compassion and empathy.
When workplace culture does shift, though, that change tends to be pervasive. It’s less about a shift in any one kind of behavior, said Jensen, than it is about a shift in the values underlying people’s choices.
“Take trying to diminish sexual harassment,” she said. “The message isn’t just, ‘respect your female colleagues.’ The message is, ‘all your colleagues deserve to be valued.’ So there are ripple effects. Those types of environments see less sexual harassment. But they also see less of other kinds of harassment, too.”
Compassion and empathy, the authors agree, are two such values that might drive change around weight stigma in the workplace.
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All told, Lemmon, Jensen, and Kuljanin hope that drawing attention to the scope of the problem will be a catalyst for change.
“When you study nastiness in the workplace, you quickly learn that people know it’s going on,” said Jensen. “It’s just that they don’t necessarily want to talk about it. So one of the things that would be good to normalize, for organizations, is this idea: Not talking about it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.”
“If the thrust of our outreach is awareness,” said Lemmon, “we’re happy.
For Jenny Ciszewski (BUS ’02), being a leader means understanding how work fits into the full scope of people’s lives — including her own.
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. 
