by Meredith Carroll | Nov 22, 2024 | Features, Student Stories
The foreign currency exchange market is endlessly complex and constantly shifting. For the institutions that trade on it, being able to do so seamlessly — and in a way that maximizes profits — is paramount.
DePaul students dived headfirst into the complexities of the foreign exchange market (also known as Forex) at the inaugural Northern Trust case competition on October 17 and 18.
Co-organized by Driehaus’ BETA Hub and the School of Computing and sponsored by Northern Trust, the competition charged teams of students (who could compete on a business or technology track) with improving a hypothetical bank’s process for Forex, including cryptocurrency. With guidance from Northern Trust professionals, students had just over 24 hours to devise a workable solution — and sell it to a panel of experienced judges.
Preparation, delegation, details — and trust
For the four Driehaus students who won the business track, the victory was a testament to the importance of preparation, delegation, details, and trust.
“I think DePaul did a great job preparing us,” said team member Diego Villaseñor. “What really helped us was knowing how to do due diligence, how to do your homework, and how to ask the right people the right questions.”
Diego, his brothers Fabian and Maximos, and their teammate Nick Lopez came in with a wide array of strengths. All seniors, their majors span accounting, marketing, management, and finance.
“The last thing you want is to be stressed about your other team members,” said Lopez. “I don’t think there was a single moment where that happened. We were able to divide and conquer. I took over the cryptocurrency side, and I knew my part forward and backward. We knew that we could trust each other with what we were assigned.”
The team had been working on building trust since long before the competition — or even their time at DePaul. The three Villaseñor brothers are triplets; Lopez is a longtime friend who grew up down the street in Orland Park, a southwest suburb of Chicago.
The group found a room where they could focus. They brought in a whiteboard to jot down ideas. Diego, the group’s finance expert, brought in a second monitor. Feedback from the judges helped them quickly to home in on the main questions:
“There are a lot of buzzwords when you talk about crypto in particular,” said Maximos. “You can come up with a lot of ideas. But how are you going to do them? What are the legal parameters? Those are the common questions teams kept getting asked by judges.”
On selling your idea
Once the team had the framework of a solution in place, they faced a second hurdle: How to sell their solution to a panel of judges in just under 10 minutes? And how to ensure their solution would be memorable?
Fabian’s experience in sales helped them arrive at a solution. They would anchor their presentation around Carmen: a fictitious pension fund manager who needed her bank to be able to make trades on foreign assets.
“It’s so important to make the information tangible,” said Fabian. “You can have great information. But if customers don’t understand it, what use is it?”
“With the Carmen story, we were able to talk about a particular client and specific issues she might have,” echoed Maximos. “It really made our presentation come full circle.”
Equally important was being ready to embrace the unexpected:
“During the Q&A portion,” said Diego, “it was so important to defend your answers, to make sure the judges were able to understand. We had to get comfortable with being asked questions on the spot.”
Connections, careers, and where to go from here
Reflecting on the experience as a capstone of sorts for their time at DePaul, the team returned to the value of making connections — to one another, to professionals, and to their careers.
“I think a lot of times, students are nervous about doing a case competition – or to network with people there,” said Lopez. “One of the mentors we spoke with was the Senior Vice President of FX Technology and Product Development for Northern Trust. He’s a very successful individual – but at the end of the day, we’re all people. I think a lot of the success we had was connecting with people on a personal level.”
All four teammates see direct connections between their experiences at Driehaus, in the case competition, and where they’re going next.
Maximos will be starting a full-time role in HR at Plante Moran, where he’s been working part-time while he finishes up his studies.
“A lot of what I work on relates back to this case study,” he said. “There’s a lot of communication. You need to be able to have trust, and to be able give and receive constructive feedback.”
Fabian will continue pursuing his passion for tech sales in a role at Salesforce. This work, he hopes, will allow him to continue helping fellow Blue Demons advance their careers.
Diego is choosing among competing offers in consulting. It’s an industry, he said, that speaks to his passion for project management and learning about new, complicated topics quickly — both skills he got to hone at the case competition.
Lopez, who is graduating in June, is preparing to sit for his CPA exam. After graduation, he has an offer lined up with Apercen Partners, a boutique tax consulting firm for high net-worth individuals: the kind of setting where he may well be able to implement what he’s learned from his deep dive into Forex and cryptocurrency.
When the team looks back on their time at DePaul, they think of opportunities like this case competition. Over time, the team said, such opportunities can accumulate into invaluable experience.
“All four of us are first-generation college students. That, and coming from a Latino background, really lit a fire under us to make the most out of our time here,” said Maximos. “I think case competitions like this really help you build those connections and get experience. Win or lose, you’re still going to get something – and it’s those connections with those people.”
by Meredith Carroll | Nov 19, 2024 | Alumni Profiles
Dana Alkhouri is many things: A Triple Demon who earned her bachelor’s, her master’s in public policy, and her MBA from DePaul. A journalist who covered the height of the pandemic on the ground in New York working for ABC News. And, as of a few years ago the founder of The Sidelines, a newsletter that focuses on women in athletics and wellness.
Recently, Dana shared her insights into making a career pivot, making space for women’s stories, and making it in the face of skepticism.
Driehaus College of Business (DCOB): Tell us about your current project, The Sidelines: a newsletter focused on sharing stories from women’s sports and wellness. How did it get started? What’s the most impactful advice you received along the way?
Dana Alkhouri (DA): The Sidelines is a sports newsletter by women and for all.
My friend Megan Schaltegger and I launched it in 2020. We started it because, back then, there was not a huge amount of interest in coverage of women in sports. It was such a niche industry. So we thought: let’s get ahead of it.
We initially wanted to start as a website. And we got advice from another founder to start as a newsletter instead. We’ve built out some great partnerships and gotten a great group of readers that way.
DCOB: Did you always know you wanted to be an entrepreneur? How did you launch your career in journalism, and how was DePaul part of that?
DA: I’ve always had this entrepreneurial mindset. When I was a kid, I started this jewelry business on Etsy. During the pandemic, I started a sweatshirt line. I’m always looking for a project.
I have done the majority of my education at DePaul. That just goes to show how resourceful DePaul is and how much they offer to their students. And how well they connect with their students and stay in touch with them.
I had so many great experiences at DePaul. I studied abroad, primarily focusing on the EU and NATO. I had some really dedicated journalism professors who helped me figure out an independent study. That’s an amazing thing about DePaul. They’re so resourceful. They’re so dedicated to making sure students can pursue what they want.
DCOB: Around the time you launched The Sidelines, you were pivoting from a career in journalism to one in business. Can you talk about that transition?
DA: In 2020, I was working at ABC. I was going into the office every day. I was covering the pandemic, the election, everything that was going on. It was an eye-opening experience. But after awhile, I realized I needed a break from hard news.
I was able to enroll in DePaul’s MBA program full time — and fully online. During that time, in the summer of 2021, I started working at Goldman. I was working full time and going to school full time. It was important to me to do my MBA side-by-side with working at a bank, with working in business.
I graduated with my MBA last summer. It was a great experience – great connections, great networking.
DCOB: You’ve gotten the chance to speak to so many inspiring athletes and founders. What’s stuck with you about those conversati
ons?
DA: There’s this question I always ask: What is your biggest piece of advice to a woman trying to break barriers in the sports industry? Their responses are so awesome.
A lot of them have talked about the need to push through. They’ve talked about not taking no for an answer. When you get criticism, it means you’re doing something right. That’s really stuck with me.
When we launched The Sidelines, people had so many questions. They were skeptical if people were going to read it. But facing criticism was my favorite part of it. Because criticism means that you’re reaching people.
Hearing criticism is also really important because, sometimes, you need a vision from the outside. As a founder, it’s easy to get tunnel vision. We’ve actually ended up incorporating content in response to criticism.
DCOB: What does entrepreneurship mean to you?
DA: Freedom. Entrepreneurship means having an idea and being able to bring it to life. And I think there is freedom in that. You create your own power. You’re doing it for yourself. And you’re doing it for the people who work with you, and work for you, and for the audience that you are creating.
by Meredith Carroll | Jun 24, 2024 | Scholarly Pursuits
By Jamie Merchant
The hype has been extraordinary.
Over the past two years, news outlets have blanketed the public with stories about the impact of large-language models (LLMs), or “artificial intelligence,” and their profound implications for human civilization. The CEO of Tesla and billionaire investor, Elon Musk, warns that the technology represents one of “humanity’s biggest threats.” Other commentators predict a more benign future in which AI liberates us from toil, taking over the mundane tasks of office work.
With conflicting reports like these, one could be forgiven for feeling confused.
Putting the hype aside, what are the facts on the ground? How is this emerging technology actually used by businesses and organizations?
At DePaul’s Driehaus College of Business, new faculty in the Department of Marketing are cutting through the headlines to investigate the promise, and the limits, of LLMs for modern businesses.
One innovative use of LLM’s is for producing “synthetic data”, AI-generated responses that simulate humans in order to inform business intelligence. “How good is AI at really representing human variety?” asked Ignacio Luri, an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Driehaus. “That’s something I’m skeptical about. But it’s happening, so I’m studying it.”
Luri, at right, in the Beta Hub
Luri, whose background is in marketing and linguistics, also studies what he calls the “market conversation”: the dialogue that unfolds around companies, consumers, and the brands that connect them. His current research focuses on the uses of AI analytics for studying that conversation. “I mostly study big data,” he said, referring to the modern study of human behavior based on very large data sets. “But I also have a qualitative toolkit.
“The market conversation is very cultural at heart,” he explained. “It happens in a cultural context. It can be really tempting to take a dataset and just crunch the numbers. But we’re talking about people. When we’re talking about the consumer conversation, things happen in a context – always. Who said that? When? Why? In what context? To whom?”
In other words: how consumers see brands, and conversely, how companies understand their customers, are both products of an ongoing dialogue between them. And, like any dialogue, the market conversation unfolds in the assumptions, habits, and beliefs that characterize particular people in a particular community at a particular point in time – that is, in all the messiness of human communication.
How apt are large language models to capture the subtle nuances of human speech, or the unique meanings that attach to specific words for a given community? Amidst all the enthusiasm for AI, Luri insists on the importance of not losing sight of the human element – the inherently contextual nature of communication.
“All that matters. It’s important not to abstract away from all that reality.”
As with generative AI, buzzwords swirl around the emerging field of neuromarketing. According to the Harvard Business Review, this new field “studies the brain to predict and potentially even influence consumer behavior and decision making.” One can easily imagine the value of this technology for businesses.
Such is the potential, but how does it work in practice? Most importantly, what are the real advantages and limits of the technology?
“With neuromarketing, I always say it’s a supplement, not a replacement, for traditional marketing research,” said Jennifer Tatara, Assistant Professor of Marketing at Driehaus.
A computer in the Beta Hub equipped with neuromarketing research software
Tatara works at the cutting edge of the neuromarketing field, which mines insights from psychology, marketing, and economics to look at the science behind consumer decision-making. Neuromarketing introduces biometric data into the study of consumer behavior, assisting researchers with an age-old question: what motivates people to make the decisions they do?
Marketing researchers and professionals, of course, are interested in a specific subset of people: consumers.
“We can use these tools to see into the decision-making process in a different way,” said Tatara, “to get into the black box of decision-making. We need a wide range of tools to get the full picture. But without biometric tools, you’re missing a piece of that picture.”
Some of these tools might be familiar. Electroencephalograms, for instance, gauge mental activity by tracking the small electrical impulses given off by the brain in response to stimuli. But some are more exotic: eye-tracking software yields insights into where consumers’ focus is drawn. Galvanic skin response, a measure of minuscule amounts of sweat, correlates with subjects’ emotional arousal.
Tatara emphasizes the potential of these tools to help both consumers and businesses make better, more satisfying decisions. But she is also quick to deflate the exaggerated claims sometimes made on its behalf, and to point to the ethical dimensions of this new field. As she puts it, “there’s no magical ‘buy’ button in the brain – this isn’t mind control.”
“Like with any new tool, there are ways to use it positively and ways to use it negatively. As marketers with access to these tools, it’s our job to make sure we’re not only selling, but we’re also helping. With a better understanding of how people make decisions, we can help them make better decisions.
“That’s why I’m happy that DePaul is taking an active role in teaching these tools. Here, faculty and students study and apply these tools; we’re doing it ethically, and we’re doing it to help consumers, at the end of the day.”
by Meredith Carroll | Jun 24, 2024 | Alumni Profiles, Features
Paula Price (BUS ’82) shares her insights from an extraordinary career as a leader
By Meredith Carroll
Look at Paula Price’s (BUS ’82) resume, and it could be tempting to split it in two.
There’s her leadership experience, as extensive as it is varied. There’s her tenure as CFO for multiple Fortune 500 companies; her years of teaching for Harvard Business School; and her current role as an independent board director for four major, publicly traded companies.
And then there’s the part of her career that started right here at DePaul. The part where she mastered accountancy, the “language of business.” The part she spent on the ground, immersed in the many small but critical details that keep businesses running.
It is easy to imagine these two phases as diametrically opposed: first the view from the ground, and then the view from 30,000 feet. First the microscope, and then the panoramic lens.
Diametrically opposed, that is, until you hear Price tell her story.
A Tale of Dedication to Curiosity and Craft
Photos of Price on stage in conversation with Sulin Ba, Dean of the Driehaus College of Business, on April 22 (Photo credit | Working Anchor)
On April 22, Paula Price returned to DePaul to share insights from her career. She was the first speaker in the college’s Executive Speaker Series: a series, established with a gift from Cory Gunderson (BUS ’91) designed to help DePaul students envision and embark on their own paths to success.
Sitting across a small stage from Dean Sulin Ba, Price speaks in the measured tone of an experienced leader. She chooses each word with care and clarity. She is passionate about taking the time to get it right — whether “it” is a major decision in a corporate boardroom, or a visit to her alma mater.
What shines through above all else, though, is Price’s commitment to curiosity.
She lights up when talking about her early career. You can see the student in her; the young DePaul graduate, eager to master a notoriously challenging discipline.
“I spent the first several years of my career in public accounting really honing my skills and honing my craft,” she recalls. After that came a tenure in industry, when she began working with senior executives.
“What they wanted to know,” she says, “was: ‘is this a good business idea? Does this create value for our shareholders? Does this idea have a good return?’ It became very evident to me that accounting should do more than talk about the past. It should illuminate the path forward.”
It is the first of many moments of clarity – in the way Price speaks about the world of business, in the way she charted her own course through it. That fundamental insight led her to the University of Chicago, where she earned her MBA in finance and strategy. She became obsessed with putting her insight into action.
“How do you create financial models for looking at new product lines? For looking at acquisitions? For looking at research and development projects?” she remembers asking herself. “I just began building all these models. People knew that I was modeling these things. And they were asking me to work with them. They were asking me to lend my models to them.”
“I kind of thought,” she adds with a smile, “I could build a financial model for anything.”
From left to right: Malik Murray (BUS ’96, MBA ’04), Dean Sulin Ba, Laura Kohl (MBA ’94), Paula Price (BUS ’82) and Cory Gunderson (BUS ’91). Murray, Kohl and Gunderson are all members of the Driehaus Business Advisory Council. (Photo credit | Working Anchor)
Price’s curiosity, and the keen insights it generated, propelled her to the C-suite.
“Even as a CFO, the idea of fusing accounting, finance and strategy together was essential,” she says. “It was essential to telling the story of our business, to telling the story of our strategies and how they created value. To telling the story of what they would do in the future.”
There’s such clarity to the way she tells her story that it can be hard to imagine her path as anything other than foreordained. Hard to remember, too, that her time as a top leader spanned multiple major financial crises.
When Price looks back on moments of turmoil, it’s her dual perspective she returns to. Her ability to see the big picture without losing sight of the small but crucial details. To keep her eyes on the horizon without losing sight of the world around her.
“The biggest role of the CFO is to create space for innovation,” she says, when asked about difficult decisions she has faced. “And economic downturns often coincide with the greatest need to invest in innovation. That leads to tough decisions.
“What’s hard,” she adds, “is that at the end of those kinds of decisions are people.”
The People Factor
And that’s what Price returns to, what she never loses sight of in telling her story: people.
During her visit, she is asked about her seemingly inexhaustible career: the way her resume encompasses seven top leadership positions at major, publicly traded companies. That’s not to speak of her time teaching the next generation of leaders at Harvard Business School, or her service to nonprofits and her community.
It was all simpler, she says, than it might look from the outside.
“For every major move in my career,” Price says, “I can point to a relationship that is based on trust. Trust in my work. Trust in my abilities. Trust in my integrity. These relationships – they lead places. Connections lead places. Every person. Every change. Whether it’s moving to London. Moving back to the U.S. Moving into teaching. Moving out of teaching. Pivoting back into corporate. Pivoting onto boards. I can point to a person. For each move, I can point to a person.”
“You can’t be my friend overnight,” she quips, later, when Dean Ba points out that many of her friendships have lasted decades. In fact, some of them have lasted since high school. Two of her friends from her days at what was then called Jones Commercial High School sit in the front row, laughing. All night, they’ve been cheering her on.
Price and Dean Sulin Ba pose with two of Price’s close friends, both of whom attended DePaul alongside her: Charlena Griggs (far left) and Aaron Tolbert (BUS ’82, far right)
(Photo credit | Working Anchor)
Price sums up her advice to the students and young alumni in the audience by reflecting on her own career and the principles that have guided it:
“I have four pieces of advice. The first is: to find your towering strength. That is, the thing that distinguishes you from the next person. And, when you find it? Own it, hone it, and leverage it.
“The second, third, and fourth, is to: Build great relationships. Build great relationships. Build great relationships.”
by Meredith Carroll | Jun 24, 2024 | Alumni Profiles, Features
The retired FBI agent, corporate executive, author and philanthropist reflects on the educations he received — in school and outside of it
By Meredith Carroll
Millie Cronin and Sean McWeeney | Photo provided by Sean McWeeney
Now retired, Sean McWeeney (BUS ’61) lives a quiet life in Reston, Virginia, with his wife, Millie Cronin. They are both widowers; in fact, they met through Cronin’s first husband, a coworker of McWeeney’s. They volunteer for their local parish. They spend time with their family. They support causes close to their hearts, including DePaul. Just this year, McWeeney established the McWeeney Family Scholarship Fund to help under-resourced students attend DePaul.
McWeeney’s life up to this point was anything but quiet. He served for decades in the FBI, where he played a central role in the capture of notorious Mob boss Carlo Gambino. He rose through the ranks to become the longest-serving section chief of the Organized Crimes division. After his retirement, he launched Corporate Risk International, a global security firm specializing in kidnapping and extortion cases. It’s a career so action-packed that, with the encouragement of his family and friends, he wrote a book about it, entitled “Up by the Bootstraps.”
Like many success stories, McWeeney’s life attests to the ever-shifting balance between luck and hard work. It’s a story about being in the right place at the right time, but it’s also about having the right skills to rise to the moment. It’s a story about education, broadly defined: the kind of education you get from the people and environments around you. The kind of education you make out of what you are given.
McWeeney’s education would ultimately take him around the world. But it began right here in Chicago.
A Chicago Childhood
It has been decades since McWeeney lived in Chicago – a lifetime, even. But his roots are still evident. He speaks with a faint Chicago accent. He talks about himself with a distinctively Chicagoan strain of understatement: humble yet direct; self-effacing yet also, justifiably, proud.
McWeeney was born in 1938 to two Irish immigrants. Among the kids in his West Side neighborhood, he can’t recall knowing anyone whose parents were born in the U.S. Being in that environment at that time was an education – only McWeeney didn’t know it yet.
“I was a scrappy kid,” he recalls. “I had an unusual name for that time, and they made fun of me for it.”
It was easy to fall into trouble.
“A lot of people I grew up with became Mafia,” McWeeney says. “We had one person we knew quite well whose brother was killed by the Mafia.”
It was an environment that offered up two ways to navigate the world.
“You either win one way, the good way,” McWeeney recalls, “or you win the bad way. And I happened to be lucky in who I turned out to be. Going to a school like DePaul certainly helped – and so did having good parents. I was lucky in that regard.”
The West Side gave McWeeney one kind of education. In school, he received another.
For high school, he earned a four-year scholarship to St. Ignatius College Prep. It promised to be a pivotal moment for McWeeney. But it lasted just two weeks.
McWeeney was kicked out after a fight with a boy who made fun of his name. He transferred to St. Mel’s, another Catholic school.
“St. Mel’s identified me as a bit of a thug,” he says. “They assumed that ‘this guy isn’t going to college. This guy won’t go much further because he’s a scrapper.’ That’s part of being from the West Side, I guess.
“Anyway,” McWeeney adds, with his trademark understatement, “I outdid their expectations.”
From DePaul to the FBI
Outdoing those expectations began in earnest when McWeeney enrolled in the College of Commerce at DePaul University.
At DePaul, McWeeney found his place.
Despite working a grueling overnight shift at the railroad switchyard off 35th and Pulaski, he was active in sports and in his fraternity. In his senior year, he was elected class president.
He also met his first wife at DePaul: the late Joan Hennessy, a fellow student. They were set up on a blind date. They would travel the world together, raise a family, and launch Corporate Risk International from their kitchen table.
When McWeeney looks back on his time at DePaul, it’s his good fortune that he stresses. The good fortune to have met Hennessy; the good fortune to receive an education that allowed his world to expand, equipping him with tools he’d need to earn his MBA and launch a second career as a successful entrepreneur. Good fortune — and the commitment to taking advantage of it.
McWeeney, at right, escorts Carlo Gambino into the courthouse for his hearing. The photograph would be widely reproduced, leading McWeeney to receive media enquiries up until today. | Photo provided by Sean McWeeney
From DePaul, McWeeney ventured out into the world. He joined the Navy as an officer candidate. He moved to Rhode Island, where he earned his MBA.
The MBA allowed him to stand out when he applied for his dream job as an agent at the FBI.
From day one, working in the FBI was its own kind of education. He lived in cities in distant corners of the U.S. He learned all he could – from the culture, and from agents who were stationed in these posts as discipline.
“The punished agents knew how to get the job done,” he writes in his memoir. They were also repentant, “eager to share their story and what they learned from it.”
In the summer of 1969, McWeeney and his family landed in New York, where he was eventually assigned to the Gambino Squad.
Thanks to his upbringing, he was precisely the right man for the job.
“There were a lot of agents, believe me, who were a little leery of talking to the Mafia,” he recalls. “But when you grow up where I did, you just kind of learn to talk to them. I used to go right up to them – let them know who I was and what I wanted to know.”
He approached his work as a plain dealer: collected, straightforward, respectful. In McWeeney’s hands, even the arrest of Gambino was understated.
Gambino’s wife and children were with him, McWeeney recalls, when McWeeney and his agents pulled him over near his home in Brooklyn.
“He seemed surprised,” McWeeney writes, “but consistent with his typical demeanor, he remained calm and gave us no trouble during the arrest.”
The Capstone of a Remarkable Career
The Gambino arrest, like McWeeney’s years at DePaul, was a turning point in a much longer story. From there, he would go on to senior leadership positions in the Bureau. He would found a successful, global company.
McWeeney’s memoir, Up by the Bootstraps, details his life and extraordinary career. | Photo provided by Sean McWeeney
But if you ask McWeeney, it’s those early days as an FBI agent that stand out.
“If anyone ever asks what I did, my first reaction is to say I was an agent,” he says. “I was a top executive, of course. But I’m very, very proud of the fact that I was an FBI agent.
“It was the first time my father ever said he was proud of me – and I heard that from secondary sources,” he recalls. “My dad was soft-spoken, a tough guy. All he did was work, work, work. For him to have said that meant a lot.”
