NyaDorsey, Author at PhD Project Stories

One City

One city. How hard could it be?, IBM executive Harriette Bettis-Outland wondered. Riding the wave of a successful, ten-year sales and marketing career in computer software, she had begun considering other options when her baby son was born. At the time, she was traveling five days a week—which didn’t leave much time to experience, much…

Young Motivators

For some prospective doctoral students, being the parent of young children is grounds to defer taking the plunge for a few years. But for Dr. Velvet Weems-Landingham, having a toddler and an infant was a powerful motivator—and a welcomed source of stress relief. “Having children pushed me to get through,” Dr. Weems-Landingham says. “I realized, ‘I…

Date Nights

The e-mail message was one of the longest and most detailed Dr. Ariana Pinello had ever received from a student. It recited countless facts and information bits from a class Dr. Pinello had taught, including some she had herself forgotten—and with good reason: the class had taken place a full year ago. The student had…

More Than Money

Seeking out a new career path upon retiring from the Navy, Ulysses Brown taught middle school for a while, then enrolled in advanced graduate studies in psychology. Along the way, he began assisting a faculty member in research. One day the professor pulled him aside and asked, “Do you know the difference between a Ph.D.…

“The Landlord”

Ricardo Valerdi was the only doctoral student in his program—and probably the state—who spent evenings repairing broken plumbing pipes and fixing faulty electrical wiring. The unusual nocturnal activities were the result of a creative, if occasionally nerve-racking strategy he devised to pay the bills during his doctoral studies. Having chosen to trade a lucrative paycheck…

His Own Path

In eight years as an operations and finance manager in Fortune 500 companies, Ronald Ramirez saw his employers invest vast sums of money in new information technologies. Despite the benefits generated from using the technology, it was often unclear how to measure the actual return on these large investments. Ramirez grew eager to look deeper…

The Investment

Through more than five intense years as a doctoral student, Kendra Harris could not help but notice that her old friends in corporate life were driving newer cars, and living in bigger houses than she was. And every time a former colleague jetted off for another lavish vacation, she needed to check in with her inner value…

When Five Becomes Eight

The Berlin Wall was falling, and Nichole Castater was right there. An undergraduate studying German abroad for a semester, she had chosen Berlin, and found herself witnessing history unfolding. The excitement in the air was palpable that year, and it caught Dr. Castater, carrying her in a new career direction—one in which she would help…

Other-mindedness

The booming 1990s were a heady, exciting time to be an advertising executive for Fortune 500 companies and top agencies. But for Andrea Scott, there was an unsettling undercurrent to those go-go years. She subscribed to a viewpoint she calls “other-mindedness,” and she wasn’t seeing enough of it in her environment. “I was troubled by the…

“Out-of-body” Experience Yields Deal of Lifetime

Wall Street investment banker Byron Hollowell, working ninety hours a week during the go-go 90’s on some of the planet’s hottest deals, sometimes paused to wonder about the long-term benefits of the mergers and acquisitions he was helping to arrange. When he did, his manager would tell him, “Hollowell, you need to get busy, and…