Dan Stewart, back in his undergraduate days, paid more attention to his professors than did most of his classmates. He was sizing them up as potential role models. “I liked watching my professors, and I held them in high esteem,” he says. “I thought that being up there and doing that was something I’d enjoy.…

From high school days in his native Ethiopia on, Amanuel Tekleab yearned to become a professor. Spurred by parents who lacked formal schooling but placed great value on education, he set out after his dream. The path led to seven years of teaching business in his homeland, and then to the United States, where he…

As a retail branch manager and vice president for one of the world’s premier banking companies, Patricia Hewlin often found herself at the front of a training classroom, instructing employees in job skills. Before  long, this rising corporate star realized that teaching, even more than banking, was her calling. Fortunately, her employer knew just what…

In a career that started on the streets and has now turned to academia, Jeff Brice, Jr. has run his own film production company, headed a construction business, and  worked on job-development with ex-convicts and welfare mothers. As an affordable housing developer, he recalls, “We’d go into drug-infested properties, kick out the dealers, and then…

Millicent Nelson, born to a family full of academics and students, recalls that “teaching was a gift from God to me; I was always the one teaching people how to do things.” But she restricted her instructing to the corporate world, where “I was having a great time” in seventeen years of frequent travel, promotions,…

Sammie Robinson was a child of the 1950s. “I come from a background,” she explains, “where the most optimistic dream was that I would attend a small Black  college and maybe become a teacher.” But business appealed to the young woman, and although she did attend college, “it was a vocational experience.” After graduating she…