A Conversation with NAF President JD Hoye and NAF Alumni

4 Nov 2009

2009 marks the 40th anniversary of career academies, standing the test of time, and showing significant growth across the United States. Recently, National Academy Foundation President JD Hoye sat down with NAF alumni Jeff McCall and Mohammed Alam to talk about their experiences at NAF Academies, and how their academies prepared them for their college and careers.

About Jeff McCall
Jeff McCall works in a business development capacity at Sears Holdings Corporation and is a member of the Senior Leadership Program, a group charged with helping lead the management turnaround of this Fortune 50 Company. Jeff is a 2008 graduate of the Harvard Business School where he received his Masters in Business Administration. Prior to Harvard, Jeff spent four years working on Wall Street as an institutional salesman and trader of equities products at both Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley in New York. In his hybrid sales role, he serviced a diverse group of institutional clients, each managing between $500 million - $1 billion in assets. Jeff received his undergraduate degree in economics from Columbia University in New York where he was a Kluge scholar, and participated in athletics as the first African-American quarterback in school history. He is a 1998 graduate of the Golightly Career and Technical Center’s Academy of Finance in Detroit, Michigan.

About Mohammed Alam
Mohammed Alam currently attends Adelphi University in Garden City, Long Island and where he is pursing a bachelor of arts and intends to major in Political Science and minor in Psychology. He then hopes to pursue a Masters in Business Administration. Mohammed’s NAF internship took place in the summer of 2008, at Citigroup in their Citicards headquarters. Mohammed was an intern in the division of Global Consumer Group (GCG) and worked in the Credit Card National Sales department with my supervisor Danielle Vooris, monitoring credit activity. Mohammed is a graduate of the Academy of Finance and Enterprise AOF in Long Island City, NY.

1. How did you first hear about a NAF Academy, and why did you choose to enroll?

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2. Was your Academy experience everything you expected it to be?

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3. Who was a person who had a significant impact on your Academy experience?

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4. Did you have aspirations to go to college?

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5. Is there a business connection from your Academy experience that brought the curriculum to life?

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6. From the college perspective, what elements of the Academy experience prepared you for college?

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7. If you had to pick one thing, what would you advise the National Academy Foundation to focus on and do better?

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8. If you were talking a group of business leaders, what would you suggest to them that they could do to have a positive impact in education?

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9. How would you advise NAF to build its alumni base?

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10. What would you share with policymakers about the Academy model and how it can impact education reform efforts?

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11. What would you suggest for nonprofits to become more collaborative with each other?

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12. Jeff McCall asks JD Hoye: What is the two- to five-year plan for NAF?

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13. Mohammed Alam asks JD Hoye: What is NAF doing to connect high school to college and the workplace even more?

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14. Where do you hope to see yourself in the future?

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Featured Event

Seattle Academies of Finance Case Competition

6:30pm Apr 19, 2010

In a competition created by an AOF alumna, students from Seattle’s Academies of Finance analyze Harvard Business School case studies. They are partnered with undergraduate mentors from the University of Washington’s business school and compete for scholarship money. In 2009, 42 teams from three high schools participated in the contest. The school competition and final competition for this event will be held Monday, April 19, 2010. >