We’re going through the academic research that focuses on gender and entrepreneurship and trying to understand the key drivers of gender disparities in entrepreneurship. We are trying to use research evidence to uncover opportunities to level the playing field.”
– Alyssa Westring

Last spring Shelley Rosen, one of the 40 founding committee members of the Women in Entrepreneurship Institute (WEI), welcomed a mix of DePaul graduate and undergraduate students to her West Side Chicago office, where she and several employees run her luxury flower business Luxe Bloom. The students were celebrating their completion of Women Entrepreneurs, a new special topics course taught by Associate Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship Alyssa Westring. Rosen was among the class’s guest speakers, providing an inside look at the real world of women in entrepreneurship.

The class—created by Westring, who serves on the WEI committee— required students to examine research surrounding the challenges and opportunities facing women entrepreneurs. Several of the students in the class were aspiring entrepreneurs, while others just wanted to learn more about women’s roles in entrepreneurship directly from women business founders.

“As a female in a male-dominated, industry there are a number of challenges that I face on a daily basis,” says class member Lesley Kraft (MBA ’19), senior manager of digital experiences at Life Fitness, a Chicago-based organization and brand that creates fitness equipment. “This class seemed like it would provide me with an opportunity to learn from other female business leaders’ failures and successes—something I believe is invaluable.”

Each week, Westring invited women entrepreneurs and leaders to talk about their personal stories of working as entrepreneurs.

“We’re talking about a variety of topics including bias, negotiation, access to mentoring and self-efficacy,” Westring says. “We’re going through the academic research that focuses on gender and entrepreneurship and trying to understand the key drivers of gender disparities in entrepreneurship. We are trying to use research evidence to uncover opportunities to level the playing field.”

Ensuring research is at the forefront of WEI’s mission is one of Westring’s goals as a committee member. Westring, who frequently delivers talks on women’s careers and work/life balance, has historically studied women’s careers in medicine and science. When she discovered that WEI was forming at DePaul, she knew she wanted to get involved.

“The barriers that women face in entrepreneurship are similar to those that they face in most male-dominated industries, such as reduced access to resources and opportunities. In science, that might mean grant funding, whereas in entrepreneurship that might mean venture capital,” Westring says.

To shed light on these issues and help WEI measure the effectiveness of its programming for women, Westring helped create a survey for women business owners in the first cohort in WEI’s accelerator program. The survey assesses the cohort members’ “entrepreneurial self-efficacy”—the belief in their capacity to be effective entrepreneurs. It was administered before and after participants completed the program to measure differences in their self-efficacy.

Rosen, who began her career in advertising for major global brands, agrees that research is important for women to understand their value, whether as entrepreneurs or in their quest to achieve equal pay for equal work.

“When I started working it was 69 cents on the dollar,” says Rosen, who opened her business Luxe Bloom five years ago. “Now it’s only 79 cents in 40 years. Ten cents? I’m not complaining, it’s progress, but it’s really slow. I just hope to make a small difference in those numbers.”

Read about the Business Accelerator Program at the Women in Entrepreneurship Institute business.

By Jaclyn Lansbery | Photo by Kathy Hillegonds

The whole motto of Greenwood is you can’t be what you can’t see. These kids come to us with almost no social capital.”

An immigrant from Trinidad, graduate business student Bevon Joseph has forged his own path in tech, finance and nonprofit management since coming to the United States at 18 years old.

Joseph is founder and CEO of Greenwood Project, a nonprofit he launched three years ago to help academically talented youth from underresourced Chicago communities gain access to the finance industry. Thanks to Joseph’s connections with firms in New York and Chicago, the Greenwood Project has collaborated with about 30 financial and tech companies, including Goldman Sachs, NASDAQ, Google and LinkedIn.

Joseph joined the world of finance in 1996 when he began working as an IT services provider on a New York trading floor, and later worked for some of the city’s largest Wall Street exchanges and financial services firms. He moved to Chicago, eventually working his way up to be a chief technology officer for a hedge fund—all with just an associate’s degree in computer electronic technology and a high school diploma from Trinidad.

Fascinated by the passion he witnessed on trading floors, Joseph noticed the lack of diversity among employees. “Most of the time I would be one of (a few) or the only person of color at a firm,” says Joseph, who runs the Greenwood Project with his wife, Elois. “I was always curious why other students who look like me weren’t given that opportunity.”

In 2014, Joseph enrolled in DePaul’s School for New Learning and became the first in his family to earn a bachelor’s degree. Joseph developed the idea for the Greenwood Project through a class assignment that challenged him to create a social media campaign around a social cause. After his professor encouraged him to pursue the idea, Joseph approached top-level financial executives he knew to gauge their interest in funding internships for students from low-income communities. His nonprofit began taking shape as interest from companies grew.

“They (students) are smart, they’re doing well in school, staying out of trouble, getting good grades, but they don’t know anyone who works in finance,” says Joseph, who now is enrolled in the Driehaus College of Business’s combined bachelor’s and master’s in entrepreneurship program. “The whole motto of Greenwood is you can’t be what you can’t see. These kids come to us with almost no social capital.”

The nonprofit works with high school juniors through recent college graduates. High school students attend, free of charge, the Summer Financial Institute, a six-week program that helps them build soft skills and financial literacy. The students also visit a different company each day of the program, in both New York and Chicago. In addition, Greenwood hosts Women in Wall Street student networking events in Chicago that feature panel discussions by female executives at top firms.

To help fund the nonprofit, Joseph manages a for-profit arm of Greenwood that charges companies to have access to recruit students who have been involved with the Greenwood Project.

“Running your own business, whether it’s nonprofit or for-profit, is a 24/7 job,” Joseph says. “But for me it doesn’t feel like work, just because we see the results and the impact that it’s having. And it’s changing the lives not just of the students, but their family and community. So I think that’s my motivation to keep doing this.”

More student leader profiles:

• Olena Cruz: A Leader on Campus
• Kevin Felisme: A Leader in the Community
• Rebeca Mitrea: A Leader on the Court

I love building excitement among people and bringing them together to do more than they would have been able to do individually. I am a big believer that together we can succeed even more than on our own.”

Marketing, chess and salsa dancing are disparate talents Olena Cruz pursues with the diligence and boundless curiosity that has made her a force to be reckoned with.

Cruz, who graduates in June with an MBA in marketing, has been instrumental in turning the Kellstadt Marketing Group (KMG) into one of the most active student organizations in DePaul’s business school. During her one-year tenure as KMG president, the organization sponsored 16 events that collectively attracted participation from more than 1,000 students, faculty members and Chicago marketing professionals.

She is most proud of convincing Microsoft to work with KMG to create a new case competition at DePaul. “Our idea was to get a real-world business scenario that would allow students to pitch their strategic recommendations and apply business concepts they have learned in class,” she says. “We had such great engagement. Microsoft came to campus, and students, professors and the president of the university all came together to support this event, which showcased the talent of students here at DePaul.”

Cruz says her drive comes from her mother, Lubov, an immigrant from Ukraine. “She helped build my work ethic. She started her own cleaning business in Chicago, not knowing the language or many people. She’s not only an entrepreneur; she put me and my brother through college as first-generation graduates in the family. I am very proud of my mom.” Cruz’s father died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis when Cruz was 20, and every year since she has participated in fundraising walks to find a cure for the neurodegenerative disease.

During her undergraduate years at Northwestern University, Cruz, who speaks four languages, studied international relations. “Originally, I thought I would go into diplomacy. But I soon realized that I can apply those skills to business, because now every company has a global presence.” After graduating, she worked as a sales strategy coordinator at Beam Suntory, a premium spirits company. At DePaul, her curiosity led her to the field of big data analytics. She now works as a solutions analyst at IRI, which uses predictive analytics to help clients develop customer strategies.

Cruz knows how to make the right moves not only in her career, but also on the chessboard and the dance floor. She played chess competitively in high school and won the National Girls Chess Championship in 2006. A semiprofessional salsa dancer, Cruz won first place with her partner at the Chicago International Salsa Congress two years ago.

Cruz uses her dancing talent to empower others as a founding member of Inspiración Dance Chicago, a Latin dance organization that seeks to enrich the lives of young people through dance. “We teach youth to express themselves in a healthy way, to collaborate in teams, and to find creative outlets for mentorship and development.”

Of her wide-ranging success as a leader, Cruz says, “I love building excitement among people and bringing them together to do more than they would have been able to do individually. I am a big believer that together we can succeed even more than on our own.”

More student leader profiles:

• Bevon Joseph: A Leader for Career Access
• Kevin Felisme: A Leader in the Community
• Rebeca Mitrea: A Leader on the Court

That’s what inspires me and drives me—not just to be a leader, but to work with people and support them. That’s what we’re called to do as humans— support each other, love each other and be better people.”

MBA student Kevin Felisme has been living in Chicago for just four years, but his passion for improving the community in his adopted hometown runs deep.

A native of Manchester, N.H., Felisme delivered the TEDxDePaul talk “Reimagine Chicago: Power to the People,” in which he proposed using economic development to revitalize the city’s low-income communities. He hopes to develop programs, supported by either public or private dollars, that will allow neighborhood residents to own and operate businesses within the community.

“When I look at low-income, African-American communities in Chicago, I see a lack of economic development and businesses that are owned by the people within those neighborhoods,” Felisme says. “I believe that if we have the ability to control the economics in our communities, they should have businesses that are run by us, who cater to us and who will inspire people to start somewhere and say, ‘Hey, this is our foundation.’”

Growing up in a single-parent household where money was tight, Felisme first visited Chicago in 2014 during an alternative spring break trip as an undergraduate student at American University. The trip took students to tour various organizations, including Mercy Home for Boys and Girls, a therapeutic residential facility for youth. Despite having a full-time job waiting for him in Washington, D.C., Felisme was moved by the organization’s mission and decided to relocate to Chicago and work for the organization as a youth care worker.

“I’ve always thought that it was important that if you want to work with people in the community, you actually have to live there,” says Felisme, who lives in one of the city’s South Side neighborhoods. “It’s important to know who your neighbors are, not just to come in and help and then leave. You should get to know people because you’re in kinship.”

Now, Felisme is a coordinator for Mercy Home, where he manages the nonprofit’s volunteer program. In 2016, he launched an open basketball gym program through the Port Ministries, a nonprofit on the South Side that serves those in need. He’s also one of the basketball coaches for Mercy Home’s Hoops to Homework League, which partners with the Chicago Bulls to boost young men’s sportsmanship.

DePaul’s Vincentian values and connection to the city inspired Felisme to enroll at the Kellstadt Graduate School of Business in the fall of 2017. Earning an MBA degree in entrepreneurship and management moves him closer to his goal of creating businesses in low-income Chicago neighborhoods, he says.

“That’s what inspires me and drives me—not just to be a leader, but to work with people and support them. That’s what we’re called to do as human —support each other, love each other and be better people.”

More student leader profiles:

• Bevon Joseph: A Leader for Career Access
• Olena Cruz: A Leader on Campus
• Rebeca Mitrea: A Leader on the Court

By being a leader, you really have more avenues to help people. As long as it’s reflected in helping others and making an impact in the community, I think really that’s what inspires me.”

When Rebeca Mitrea moved to the United States to play on DePaul University’s women’s Division I tennis team, she was thousands of miles away from home. Mitrea was born and raised in Romania, where she began playing tennis at just five years of age. At 16, she was the No. 1 ranked tennis player in Romania and ranked 22nd in Europe.

After she joined DePaul on a full tennis scholarship, her list of accomplishments quickly grew. Mitrea became the all-time DePaul record holder for most overall tennis wins, most singles wins and most singles wins in one season. While serving as the team captain for two years, she earned several awards, including the Intercollegiate Tennis Association Cissie Leary Award for Sportsmanship, which is given to an NCAA Division I women’s player who displays inspiring dedication and commitment to her team.

Mitrea originally majored in health sciences but then transferred to the Driehaus College of Business to study finance. In 2016, she graduated summa cum laude with an undergraduate finance degree, and last year she completed her DePaul MBA in finance and international business. She now works as a credit risk analyst at HSBC Bank in Chicago and is active in its employee group, Balance, which advocates for the recruitment, development and engagement of a gender-balanced workforce.

Despite living far away from her family, Mitrea says DePaul came to feel like home. “It would help that I would go home to Romania in the summers and the winters during the breaks, but for me DePaul was family,” she says.

Mitrea credits the Athletics Department with fostering a welcoming and supportive environment for its student- athletes to become leaders. Staff members, who knew all of the athletes by name, would frequently ask Mitrea how she was doing. The department also offered a team of academic advisors, as well as other resources, to help student-athletes balance their academic workload with the demands of playing tennis.

“One of the greatest things that tennis has helped me achieve is being a higher performer, doing a number of things at the same time and doing them to the best of my abilities—not just doing 70 percent of one thing, but giving it my all with everything I did,” says Mitrea, who graduated valedictorian from high school in her home country. “It really forces you to do your best.”

Mitrea now plays tennis whenever she can and hopes to help DePaul’s tennis team as much as possible. She also plans to become a mentor in DePaul’s Alumni Sharing Knowledge Network, which connects DePaul students with alumni.

“By being a leader, you really have more avenues to help people,” she says. “As long as it’s reflected in helping others and making an impact in the community, I think really that’s what inspires me. As long as I could help all of the other girls on my team, that’s what really made me feel fulfilled and happy with all that I was doing.”

More student leader profiles:

• Bevon Joseph: A Leader for Career Access
• Olena Cruz: A Leader on Campus
• Kevin Felisme: A Leader in the Community

Whether they are millennials or members of Generation Z, DePaul business students and recent graduates were born to lead.

Ninety-one percent of millennials aspire to be leaders, the Millennial Leadership Study survey conducted by WorkplaceTrends.com found, and nearly half of those surveyed define leadership as “empowering others to succeed.” Meanwhile, according to Forbes magazine, surveys of Gen Z (those born after 1995) show that this latest generation to hit campus wants to “make their mark, in part, by making our society better than past generations have managed to do.”

Grounded in Vincentian values, DePaul provides opportunities for students to exercise their interest in socially responsible leadership from the minute they come onto campus as first-year students. Campus-wide initiatives like New Student Service Day and the annual Vincentian Service Day, and projects led by the Steans Center and Campus Ministry, allow students to become change-makers in the Chicago community DePaul calls home. In 2018 alone, DePaul students completed hundreds of thousands of community service hours.

At the Driehaus College of Business, students develop their leadership talent through classroom lessons, experiential learning, student organizations, mentorships, internships and even their own businesses ventures founded with the help of the Coleman Entrepreneurship Center and other resources. These opportunities produce young leaders who get to work immediately at solving marketplace and societal problems, inspiring peers to reach new, heights and pushing the boundaries of achievement on campus, in business, in sports and in the community.

In the following stories we highlight four soon-to-be and recent DePaul business graduates who are pursuing different paths but have one thing in common:  they use their business acumen to lead and empower others.

• Bevon Joseph: A Leader for Career Access
• Olena Cruz: A Leader on Campus
• Kevin Felisme: A Leader in the Community
• Rebeca Mitrea: A Leader on the Court

John P. Graven (BUS ’49, MBA ’50) was in DePaul’s first class of 15 MBA graduates. Like many college students of his era, he was a veteran of World War II. He served in the U.S. Army, and memories of his wartime experiences were still fresh in his mind when he entered DePaul. One memory, which he later shared with his wife, remained especially vivid.

“He was among the troops that liberated Buchenwald,” says Anastasia P. Graven (MA ’64) of her husband, who died at age 81 in 2006. The Buchenwald concentration camp near Weimar, Germany, held Holocaust survivors and political prisoners from across Europe. “The American Army wanted to reassure the prisoners that they were not another army coming to overcome them. The generals said, ‘We have to explain to the prisoners that we are here to save them.’”

The commanders asked GIs who spoke the detainees’ various languages to step forward to tell the survivors they were free. Graven, the son of Greek immigrants who settled in Chicago, volunteered to talk to the Greek survivors. “They told him to say, ‘We are Americans, we are here to help you and save you and return you to your own countries,’” Anastasia says. “The Greek prisoners fell on their knees, kissed (the soldiers’) hands and thanked them. He was a 19-year-old kid, overwhelmed by all this. It was a very moving event in his life.”

When Graven’s service ended, he returned to Chicago. “It was an opportunity to proceed in life after a harrowing experience,” his wife says. “He wanted to go back to school on the GI Bill, which of course was a big godsend. The GI Bill opened up education for many of that generation. Going to university then was an elite thing.” DePaul’s mission served the non-elite, including military veterans and the children of immigrants who wanted to expand their prospects through education. “DePaul opened its arms and made them feel welcomed, comfortable and accepted,” she says. “He treasured the whole experience.”

Graven entered DePaul’s MBA program right after earning his bachelor’s degree in accountancy. “He always was a numbers man,” Anastasia says. “He worked in accounting at a CPA firm, but he wanted to have the MBA.” He left the firm, attended MBA classes during the day and taught accounting at a junior college at night.

John and Anastasia met in 1949 after Easter Sunday services at Saints Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Church, then located on Chicago’s South Side. “He introduced himself and said, ‘Who are you?’” she recalls. “I told him, and he said, ‘I think you are the woman I am going to marry.’” They tied the knot in 1952.

John convinced Anastasia to get her master’s degree at DePaul, and they both went to work in the Chicago Public School system. John was a principal at Taft High School and an assistant superintendent; Anastasia was a principal at Boone Elementary and Stephen Decatur Classical School.

John considered DePaul his “saving place,” Anastasia says. “He told me, ‘When the time comes, and if I have the capacity, I want to support students who go there.’” In 2008, Anastasia established the John and Anastasia Graven Scholarship Funds to benefit business and music students, and she later added an accountancy student scholarship fund.

“John always said he got a good education and it provided him with opportunities to develop and move into the future,” says Anastasia. Through the Gravens’ scholarship funds, 29 DePaul students to date have had the same opportunity to attend DePaul and expand their horizons.

By Robin Florzak

Read about DePaul MBA grads from other decades:

• The 1950s: From GI to MBA
• The 1960s: Scholars of Change
• The 1970s: MBA-Powered Leaders
• The 1980s: Chicago-Educated, World Ready
• The 1990s: Cultivating People and Profits
• The 2000s: Leaders Who Pay It Forward
• The 2010s: The Career-Changing MBA

Richard H. Driehaus (BUS ’65, MBA ’70, DHL ’02), a finance industry pioneer and philanthropist, and James Jenness (BUS ’69, MBA ’71, DHL ’06), former Kellogg Co. CEO and chairman, both rose from humble beginnings on Chicago’s South Side to become successful business leaders after earning MBAs from DePaul.

Driehaus remembers fondly many of his DePaul business professors and credits one of them, economics Professor William A. Hayes, for encouraging him to finish a final class assignment necessary for earning his MBA. “I was out of the program for a couple years, and he called me up to tell me I had to get in a paper in order to get my MBA degree,” he recalls.

Driehaus submitted a paper titled “The Formation of a New Theory on Growth Investing.” “I was always interested in growth stocks and growth investing,” he says. “Earnings growth is the primary motive of business, so we seek stocks with the following characteristics: accelerating sales and earnings, desirable supporting fundamentals, upward estimate revisions and positive earnings surprises.”

My DePaul education was an important factor in how my career and life have evolved. I commend the university for creating an environment that not only excels in education, but does so in a benevolent way.” – Richard H. Driehaus

The paper coalesced Driehaus’s momentum investing philosophy, which he used to found Driehaus Capital Management in 1979. The philosophy still guides his firm’s investment decisions today.

Jenness, a graduate of Chicago’s Fenger High School, says he wasn’t a very good student until he came to DePaul’s business college. “The quality of the teachers was great,” he says. “Most of the teachers had real-world experience, which I found very valuable.”

“DePaul opened up the world for me,” he says. “I was really interested in marketing, and I wanted to work for a major company. Getting an MBA was a critical piece to be able to do that.”

Jenness rose in the ranks to become vice chairman and chief operating officer of the Leo Burnett advertising agency, and later was tapped to lead Kellogg, one of Burnett’s clients. “I have been lucky enough to work for some great companies and to become the chairman of the board of one of the world’s greatest companies, Kellogg, where I still serve on the board,” he says. “Without a DePaul education, my undergraduate and MBA education, that would never have happened. DePaul was great enabler for me to reach my potential, and I am very grateful for it.”

Both Jenness and Driehaus have given generously of their time and resources to support DePaul’s mission. Jenness chaired DePaul’s Board of Trustees (2011–14) and serves on the business college’s advisory council. Driehaus gave DePaul a $30 million gift in 2012 to support the recruitment and retention of top business faculty members, and also has contributed to international business and finance education initiatives. DePaul acknowledged his devotion to the university by naming the business college for him.

“My DePaul education, as both an undergraduate and through the graduate school of business, was an important factor in how my career and life have evolved,” Driehaus said at the college naming ceremony in 2012. “I commend the university for creating an environment that not only excels in education, but does so in a benevolent way.”

By Robin Florzak

Read more about DePaul MBA grads from other decades:

• The 1950s: From GI to MBA
• The 1960s: Scholars of Change
• The 1970s: MBA-Powered Leaders
• The 1980s: Chicago-Educated, World Ready
• The 1990s: Cultivating People and Profits
• The 2000s: Leaders Who Pay It Forward
• The 2010s: The Career-Changing MBA

DePaul business professors have long been known for incorporating the real world into their teaching and scholarship. In their classroom discussions and research, they explore emerging trends and what they mean for business and society. For management professors Helen LaVan (MBA ’69) and Harold Welsch (BUS ’66, MBA ’68), the seeds of this teaching philosophy were planted when they were DePaul MBA students themselves.

LaVan was taking night classes in the MBA program and working days in the human resources department of Montgomery Ward when executives at that Chicago-based retailer tapped her to work with a team on a special project. She and her colleagues were tasked with researching solutions for the violent unrest that had erupted in Chicago and other American cities in the wake of the 1967 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the 1968 Democratic Convention. “They wanted to be good corporate citizens, and they were trying to help prevent the riots from happening again,” she explains. The report advocated for better jobs and educational opportunities, among other remedies, to address the roots of violence.

“The fact that I was singled out to work on this was kind of amazing,” LaVan says. It solidified her interest in pursuing an academic career in business from the human resources perspective. One of only four women in her MBA class, LaVan became the first woman graduate assistant at the college. After she finished her DePaul MBA and earned a PhD in organizational behavior from Loyola University of Chicago, she returned to DePaul to teach human resources. This year, she celebrates her 49th year on the faculty.

It was the business school’s first computer class that led Welsch down a groundbreaking academic path. The use of computers in business “was new, innovative, something that appeared from nowhere,” he remembers. The college’s faculty “had the foresight to realize that we needed to harness this for creating some good, and that got me thinking, how do you harness innovations? If the computer is one of the new things happening, what other new things are just around the corner?”

Entrepreneurship was that next big thing, Welsch realized. He finished his MBA, joined DePaul’s management faculty and completed a PhD at Northwestern University. In 1973, he began working with small-business clients to test and apply some of the theories he taught in his classes. In the early 1980s, he founded DePaul’s entrepreneurship program, one of the first in the country. Since then, the nationally ranked program has produced hundreds of successful entrepreneurs who are harnessing innovations to address a wide range of business and societal challenges.

Earning an MBA was a rare accomplishment in the 1960s, Welsch says, and he treasures his degree. With an MBA, “you stood out as a candidate for the career fast track in your chosen endeavor for whatever organization you selected.”

By Robin Florzak

Read more about MBA grads from other decades:

• The 1950s: From GI to MBA
• The 1960s: Scholars of Change
• The 1970s: MBA-Powered Leaders
• The 1980s: Chicago-Educated, World Ready
• The 1990s: Cultivating People and Profits
• The 2000s: Leaders Who Pay It Forward
• The 2010s: The Career-Changing MBA

More memories from a 1960s DePaul MBA graduate:

“After graduating from DePaul with a bachelor’s degree in business in February of 1965, I immediately entered the MBA program at DePaul. All classes were in the evenings. During the day I worked as a staff accountant at J.P. Varkala & Co., a small CPA firm on the South Side.

“Among the professors I remember best was Ed Cohen. He taught a graduate financial accounting class that was outstanding. His classes were interesting and very challenging. Between taking him as an undergraduate, the CPA Review and graduate accounting classes, I had Ed for five accounting classes. It provided an excellent background. Later, when I earned a doctorate in accounting from University of Kentucky, I was ahead of my classmates in accounting knowledge and understanding, all because of Ed.

“(I also remember) Helene Ramanauskas-Marconi. Helene taught the capstone accounting class…She required us to present the results of our research in front of class, which was unusual for the time.

“The two years in the MBA program went fast because I was working in public accounting at the same time. My last class was with Marketing Professor Jack Goldstucker. Getting to the final exam for this course was a chore because it was the night of the Blizzard of ‘67 and Chicago was shut down. I had to hitch hike to the final exam. Only about a third of the class was able to get to the exam.”

— John Ahern (BUS ’65, MBA ’67)
Associate Professor of Accountancy & MIS
Director, Richard H. Driehaus Center for International Business
DePaul University