NIU Today

When accountancy graduate student Lauren Jacobs signed on to be a part of the College of Business’ International Business Seminar (IBS) last summer, she was not sure what to expect but was determined to try something new.

“My overall seminar experience was extremely positive,” Jacobs said. “I made memories that will last a lifetime, and I gained valuable insight into the cultural differences that exist across Europe both in everyday life and in business practice.”

Through the college’s IBS program, Jacobs was able to experience international business practices and the excitement of traveling outside the U.S. The program is co-sponsored by more than 25 universities, so students can make lifelong friends from across the U.S. With this unique offering, students make multiple business visits to both small, local firms as well as large, multinational enterprises. Each visit usually includes a combination of lectures, panel discussions and plant tours followed by a Q&A session. Nearly all presentations are conducted by senior management personnel.

For Jacobs, the biggest takeaway of the trip was the friendships that came out of it.

“I didn’t know anyone when the trip started, but I left the trip with people I still keep in touch with. I even visited one of the friends I made this fall for a football game at the University of Mississippi.”

“Another big positive that came out of this trip was the confidence I gained in my traveling abilities,” she said. “I had never been overseas before this trip, so I was really glad I got the chance to do it for the first time under a guided program with a group of people my age. It was much easier to navigate each city and plan for activities there when it was alongside friends than it would have been if I had tried to take a trip on my own.”

Over more than three weeks, Jacobs and her group visited Germany, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, France and England. Visiting global companies like BMW in Germany, Swarovski in Austria, Caillier Chocolate Factory in Switzerland and Galleries Lafayette in France allowed students to witness firsthand how business is done in other countries. Stops with cultural significance, such as the Dachau concentration camp in Germany and the World Trade Organization, helped to provide historical context to the business experiences the students observed.

“The cultural differences in each city were very cool but sometimes overwhelming when being experienced for the first time, so I was especially happy I wasn’t navigating it alone,” she added. “However, now I feel much more confident in my ability to travel to an unfamiliar place by myself in the future, because I know I have done it in the past.”

As Jacobs reflects on her travels, she always comes back to the people.

“One of my favorite experiences in Germany was my last night,” she said. “Abigail, one of the friends I made on the trip, is an Arabic major and speaks the language fluently. One of her goals was to find a Middle Eastern restaurant while we were abroad so she could use her speaking skills. It turned out that Munich has a very large Middle Eastern immigrant population, so we quickly found an area near Marienplatz where there were a lot of Middle Eastern restaurants and shops. I didn’t originally think of Germany as a very diverse country, so it was cool to see how the culture had blended into Germany’s culture.”

Once the women found a restaurant, Abigail was able to order for them in Arabic, which really surprised their waiter, but he was very appreciative that an American had taken the time to learn the language.

“I ended up eating some flat bread with fresh hummus and tabbouleh for dinner,” she said. “Afterward, we headed back to Marienplatz for dessert and wine at a restaurant in the Rathus-Glockenspiel. It was kind of funny to come from a dinner place that was loud and family-oriented to a German restaurant where it was quiet and reserved. It was cool to come to Germany and experience a whole other culture that I didn’t expect to find.”

As for whether Jacobs would suggest this program to other Huskies? Definitely.

“I tried unfamiliar foods, interacted with a wide range of people and had many new experiences,” she said. “It also felt like a mini college orientation because most people on the trip were from different places, so I had to push myself to get to know people because we had a limited time together. Overall, this seminar was a phenomenal experience that tested my limits and better informed me about Europe as a continent. If my time in school wasn’t coming to an end, I would gladly take the opportunity to do one of these seminars again.”

For more information, please contact Chih-Chen Lee, Ph.D., at cclee@niu.edu or 815-753-6205 or visit the IBS homepage, the IBS Facebook group or the NIU Study Abroad Office.

Yulissa Chavez and Madison Mathews

Yulissa Chavez and Madison Mathews were born long after the Vietnam War.

But that time has come alive for them thanks to a research assignment in their HESA 500: Foundations of Higher Education course that sent them digging through the Founders Memorial Library archives.

How did NIU students feel about the situation – and how did they respond? How were those perspectives or actions influenced by the arrival of combat veterans ready to start or resume their education? What view did DeKalb County residents take of the temperature on campus?

The first-year Higher Education and Student Affairs graduate students now understand how the conflict that ripped apart college campuses and their communities decades ago continues to influence the current social landscape.

“I kept an open mind,” says Chavez, who is from Aurora, Colo. “In some of the documentaries I watched, they really tried to show the justification for going to war – and they had no idea it was going to have this big of an impact. It was just about stopping communism. It was like this specific thing and trying to justify it.”

Conversely, she adds, “I came to see what students here at NIU were thinking – and they saw it differently. They were able to talk to soldiers who actually went to the Vietnam war and came back, who saw that it was having more harm than good.”

From the archives: NIU President Rhoten Smith sits May 19, 1970, to talk with more than 1,000 students blocking the Kishwaukee Bridge on Lincoln Highway. “The root cause of these campus disturbances is the Vietnam War,” Smith said.

And the local population?

“It’s not surprising to know that there was a little bit of tension,” she says, “between anyone affiliated with the university and folks who lived in DeKalb at the time who were maybe opposed to this growing demographic of students and their maybe more-open-minded ideas.”

Chavez and Mathews were among the 36 M.S.Ed. in Higher Education and Student Affairs students, including some enrolled in HESA 509: Campus Environments and Student Subcultures, who presented their projects Dec. 8 during the “Contemporary and Historic Social Movements at NIU” exhibit and reception held in the library.

Other projects examined topics such as Black Lives Matter, the women’s rights movement of the 1980s, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, GLBT rights, undocumented student rights and trans* student rights.

Significant support came from Founders Memorial Library staff Bradley Wiles, associate professor and head of Special Collections and Archives Department, and Alissa Droog, assistant professor and Education and Social Sciences librarian.

Wiles and Droog helped conceptualize the assignment and then assisted students in using the archives and finding sources for literature reviews of the larger historical context.

Carrie Kortegast

SUCH LARGER SOCIAL movements shape the values, beliefs, traditions and ways of operating for institutions of higher education, Associate Professor Carrie Kortegast told her students in assigning them to research those historical struggles at NIU and to determine the results.

Kortegast, who joined the Department of Counseling and Higher Education faculty in 2014, completed something similar during her master’s program at the University of Massachusetts.

“From my own experience, I know that there is something kind of cool about trying to investigate, and use, primary sources to understand something that happened at an institution,” she says, “and I wanted to provide my students the same opportunity, to explore something that happened at NIU and then be able to connect it to larger concepts and larger social movements that were happening in the U.S.”

Doing so supplies a glimpse into how college campuses and their host communities interact, she says, as well as how that relationship informs change on campus in areas such as student support services, student advocacy and even curriculum.

Suzanne Degges-White learns about the women’s rights movement at NIU.

“It’s important for any higher education professional to understand the historical context of where we are now,” Kortegast says.

“The reason we have places like the Center for Black Studies, the Gender and Sexuality Resource Center, the Latino Resource Center – both academic and student support services in these identity-based places – is because of larger social movements,” she says. “The reason we have more parity around women in sport is because of larger social movements and Title IX.”

Learning “how these social contexts influence current practice is important,” she adds, “but so is how larger social movements can provide, and push for, more equity.”

“If we think about more recent movements, particularly around undocumented students and the good work that NIU has done in supporting undocumented students, we see that that has been supported by student activism,” Kortegast says. “Another example is the continued work and the needed work regarding supporting trans students on campus.”

Meanwhile, the task of conducting local research via university archives reveals the fact that most records stored in such places come from administrative sources and not students.

Kelly Wesener-Michael listens to students explain their project on the Americans with Disabilities Act and NIU.

“One of the things that struck me about that is that these are individuals who are going to be working with student organizations,” she says, “so how do we encourage students organizations to think about, and document, their own experiences through these groups? That’s part of what we can do as advisors – to start encouraging student groups to share their content with the university archives so they can be the documenters and preservers of their own histories and good works on campus.”

DAKOTA WILLIAMS WORKED with Kianna Graves, Natalia Silva-Ramirez, Trevon Smith and Monica Tomarchio on “Holding Queer Space Then and Still Doing So: The Evolution of How Space Has Been Used as an Activist Tool.”

“I felt like I didn’t have enough knowledge about LGBTQ+ spaces and history, so I definitely wanted to dive into that, and I also wanted to better understand a university that I didn’t have much knowledge on or relationship with,” says Williams, who is from Aurora, Colo.

Dakota Williams

Williams and his classmates discovered that much of what they unearthed in the archives made little or no reference to national contexts, including the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s.

Students did find connections to the federal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policies of the 1990s by way of an on-campus “Do Ask, Do Tell” campaign urging the community to talk openly about sexuality.

“I was really able to see that there was a lot of bargaining that had to be done through student and administrative efforts,” Williams says. “It’s not just students. It’s not just faculty or staff who are pushing for things. It’s a combined effort, and students have to be heard. Student perspectives have to be taken into account in order to actually get work done.”

Freda Kpodo joined Alea Akers, Marissa Licea and Austin Robinson in looking at how NIU students participated in Black Lives Matter.

“Being an international student and being a Black woman, I wanted to understand social movements on campus, and one of the areas that I really connected with was Black Lives Matter,” says Kpodo, who is from Ghana. “I just wanted to understand what the movement was about and what led to its creation. There is a whole history of how it got to the point for Black people to come with the movement.”

Kpodo and her teammates discovered how NIU students in 1968 presented then-president Rhoten Smith with a list of seven grievances, which echoed the national push for Black Studies programs and resulted in the current Center for Black Studies.

Freda Kpodo

They also learned about the NIU Black Student Union’s #ProjectOutline campaign in 2016 that aimed to raise awareness of Black people killed by police.

“I gained so much knowledge about the type of students we have on campus and how much they are willing to do,” Kpodo says.

“There have been a lot of protests. There have been a lot of students speaking out on what they need and how we can help them to work for their own benefits and to advocate for themselves,” she adds. “It teaches me advocacy and that it’s important to be patient and to actually listen and be there to support them.”

Alejandra Guzman, Neyda Diaz, Katherine Hutto and Omar Ramirez researched the history of undocumented students and their human rights.

“It was really cool to dive deeper into learning about DREAM Action NIU,” Guzman says. “I’ve always heard things about this student organization on campus, but just seeing what a pivotal role they played in allies across the NIU community and in this movement was incredible, particularly the ‘Coming Out of the Shadows’ movement and how that resulted in student demands and demanding an institutional response.”

She also grasped the purpose of Kortegast’s assignment.

“It’s incredibly important in entering the field as full-time professionals – very soon for our cohort – to think about the ways that we are continuing to empower students to advocate for themselves and others, and to do that well,” Guzman says. “Being a part of that is a joy that I look forward to in the coming year.”

Gudrun Nyunt listens as a HESA student explains her archival research.

LEARNING AND MASTERING the process proved worthwhile.

“I really liked how all the pieces came together to just develop the story that was happening here at NIU,” says Mathews, who is from Yuma, Ariz. “These problems don’t go away. They are very cyclical, and they disguise themselves as new issues, but they have always been pervasive. Being able to look at our history allow us to, hopefully, be able not to repeat the harm we’ve inflicted in the past.”

Her research partner also came away feeling positive.

“I was really inspired by the way that faculty, specifically in the History Department, showed up for the students and fought for them to have a variety of perspectives on the Vietnam War – and not to take just one document as truth but to understand the power of storytelling and the power of understanding the implications that those with power have over others,” Chavez says.

“As I think about the work that I want to do, and always thinking back to the position I hold, it’s about how I can really think through bringing students a variety of resources so that they know that there’s not just one pathway or one truth for them,” she adds. “There are many things that they can seek out there.”

That resonates with Wiles, who spoke during the Dec. 8 event about what he observed about Kortegast’s students.

“Students got to search disparate pockets of things to piece this stuff together,” Wiles says, “and I was very impressed by their tenacity. It’s not always an easy process.”

Making it harder – and, at the same time, more valuable – were the unanswered questions.

“Even thought you’re sort of overwhelmed by the bulk, there is a word called ‘lacunae.’ It’s what’s missing. It’s the gaps. It’s the things that are absent,” Wiles told the attendees, “and that absence speaks volumes about where an institution is at over time. The idea is to fill that lacuna in a way that is equitable, that is inclusive and that really speaks to the representation and the stories that people have on campus.”

He also was grateful for the opportunity to assist in the projects.

“We want to work with students, with organization and with different academic departments and people across the university to try to help tell the stories,” he says. “This was a great step in that direction.”

Founders Memorial Library now will store the posters permanently in the archives.

In early December, as part of the NIU Executive MBA’s (EMBA) “Executive in Residence” speaker series event at our Naperville campus, a very special, values-driven business leader and NIU alumnus, Dennis Barsema, shared some tips about what has led to his success. In both a laugh-out-loud and tear-jerking presentation, current EMBA students and alumni listened to some of Barsema’s business and personal values which have served as his guideposts.

Denise Schoenbachler, interim dean of the College of Business, who has known Barsema for decades, introduced this charismatic leader. She spoke briefly about Barsema’s professional background, including his time at Redback Networks, where he served as president and CEO, and led the company through rapid growth and one of the most successful IPOs in Wall Street history. Barsema has also served as an instructor in the College of Business and has spent a considerable amount of time meeting with and mentoring business students.

Both Barsema and his wife Stacey have generously given their time and expertise to NIU, where Dennis serves on the NIU board of trustees and Stacey serves on the NIU Foundation board of directors. The Barsema’s ongoing support of NIU also includes the largest gift in NIU history to build a new College of Business building, Barsema Hall.

According to Schoenbachler, when Barsema lectures, he is sure to “guide [people] in [their] leadership and personal journey,” and she assured the audience that Barsema “walks the walk.”

“I’m not qualified to tell you how to lead, so I’m going to tell you how I lead. And if something I do makes sense for you, awesome,” said Barsema. He then offered a simple definition of leadership: credibility and vision. He teaches leadership on the NIU campus and believes “everyone can be a leader if you find something you care about.”

The first thing Barsema said he learned from a leadership standpoint is to be excited about what you are doing or leading.

“You won’t lead if you don’t want to,” he said, going on to address the importance of defining or talking about your purpose, the “why,” in addition to the “what” and the “how” of leadership.

Barsema quoted Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech as one of the most important speeches ever given in the history of the United States. He noted that themes in this work coincide with authors Barry Posner and James Kouzes’ philosophies about leadership being “the art of mobilizing others to want to struggle for shared aspirations.”

“Every great leader possesses a set of core values that guide their decision-making and actions,” Barsema said. “My job as a leader is inspiration. Inspire people who want to unite in order to reach our goal, in order to reach purpose. Inspiration is what we do as leaders. We need to understand how,” said Barsema.

Values-driven leadership emphasizes ethical behavior, transparency and a genuine concern for the well-being of employees, customers and the broader society. Leaders who prioritize values seek to align their actions and decisions with these principles, demonstrating integrity and authenticity in their leadership approach.

Barsema shared that he had developed a list of his values when he was about 25 years old, and shared a story about one particularly challenging situation that came up in his life.

“Life is not straight, life has twists and curves. When we get lost driving, we use a map. When you get lost in your personal life, what’s going to get you back on the road back on the right path? Your values. I still read my values every day. They are in my closet on my dresser.” Barsema said.

He then explained how his values have changed over time, but that 10 values have been at the core of his life for many decades. “1) Live a life that makes God happy. 2) My relationship with Stacey (his wife) is sacred. 3) Have purpose to my life by serving others every day. 4) Be a teacher and role model to my children and others. 5) Be an influencer of positive things in our world. 6) Allow only positive influences into my life. 7) Spend time on real friendships. 8) Don’t let material possessions define who I am. 9) Know that only I am responsible for my happiness. 10) Do not judge others. Be humble. Be kind.”

Amidst the many words of wisdom Barsema shared that evening, perhaps the most impactful was his story about a personal challenge that he overcame, which ultimately led to one of the Wall Street’s most successful business transactions while he was CEO at Redback Networks.

“I stutter. I stuttered my whole life. When I graduated from [NIU], I couldn’t put three words back to back. So, what did I do? Again, I live my life with no escape routes, I got into sales. I figured if I was going to learn to communicate, and I was going to learn to speak, I was going to have to do it in order to be successful as a salesperson,” Barsema said as the crowd chuckled at his humor. “I [once] had a choice to sell [a] company, but I also had the opportunity to take the company public. I felt that the maximum shareholder value would come from public markets. I was afraid of IPO because of the road show and being able to adequately showcase the investment potential of our company. I was afraid to do that because of my stuttering.”

At the time, Barsema’s wife Stacy encouraged him to hire a speech coach in preparation for that public speaking, and he did. In fact, he rehearsed his road show presentation 100 times, internally and to himself in a mirror, before his time on the road ever began. And after the road show ended, on the day the company went public, all the institutional investors he had presented to participated in the IPO.

“The valuation of our company at the end of the day had increased significantly,” Barsema said.  He told the audience that had he let the fear of his stuttering drive his decision, he would not have done the IPO.

“Don’t let fear drive your decisions,” Barsema said, and “failure is just data. I would much rather see us make mistakes than stand still because we are frozen in fear.” Fortunately for the company, Barsema faced his fears head-on and success followed.

Barsema is an incredibly inspirational business leader who embodies values-driven leadership and is a true testament to the power of aligning personal values with business endeavors. His story is one to celebrate, and it serves as a reminder that success is not just measured by financial achievements but also by the professional and personal obstacles we can overcome and the positive influence we can have on others and the world around us.

“It is always an honor and a pleasure to hear Dennis speak,” said Schoenbachler. “Every time I have the chance to hear Dennis speak, and I have done so many times, I take away something that helps me personally and professionally. This presentation was no exception. The students, staff and alumni in the room that evening had an incredible opportunity to learn from an authentic values-driven leader.”