Training Ground
Sometimes, even MVPs can use some extra guidance.
Just ask Cheryl Davis Jordan, LA’76. Her executive coaching business, Color Outside the Lines, helps high-performing senior managers hone their leadership skills.
“Pretty good” has never been good enough for Davis Jordan.
This journalism major started building her business background by working in marketing communications at General Electric during the Jack Welch era.
GE was a great training ground, because excellence was the norm there, she says: “You always had to bring your A game.”
When her mother became ill, Davis Jordan moved back home to the Washington, D.C., area, opening her own marketing-communications consultancy, then founding Color Outside the Lines in Fort Washington, Maryland, in 1999.
Davis Jordan’s high-profile clients have included the U.S. Executive Office of the President, General Mills, and the U.S. Department of Defense.
As she coaches, she asks executives tough questions to help them embrace larger roles. “There’s nothing like seeing leaders embody the learning and own it,” she says.
At Northeastern, sampling a wide variety of co-ops—from working in the Boston Globe classifieds department, to reviewing and classifying books at the Library of Congress—
prepared her for success, she says. “My approach was ‘What different adventure can I explore?’”
As a result, “I learned to be comfortable with the unknown, to be comfortable learning from experience.”
It’s a winning formula.
Magdalena Hernandez, MBA’02
Empowering the disabled
After a 1983 mugging in Virginia left him paraplegic, Ron Bielicki, AS’89, decided to devote himself to social justice.
Service was already a big part of who he was: Bielicki was in the U.S. Navy when he was held up at gunpoint while on shore leave and shot in the back.
To say his Navy toughness served him well is an understatement. “I’d just completed boot camp, so my rehab took ninety days,” the Cape Cod native says.
When he got out of the Veterans Administration hospital in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, Bielicki set his sights on a bachelor’s degree from Northeastern.
“It was the only school I applied to,” says Bielicki, who majored in speech communication. Co-op was a draw, so was the accessibility offered by the campus’s tunnel system.
Even before graduation, Bielicki was nationally known for his commitment to gun control. He starred in two public-service announcements (one set at Northeastern). He also worked behind the scenes on the Brady Bill.
After earning his degree, Bielicki worked in public relations for the organization Wheels Across America, and for Kerry Kennedy Cuomo. In 1990, he started the WIN Foundation, a nonprofit that to date has awarded thirty new custom racing, tennis, and basketball wheelchairs to junior athletes. He’s also
served on the Greater Boston chapter of the National Spinal Cord Injury Association, most recently as a vice president and a board member.
Not long ago, Bielicki was thrown another curveball. A two-year-long illness means he now has to use a power wheelchair to get around, a development he downplays as “the new normal.”
He’s philosophical about the challenges he’s faced. “I’ve experienced discrimination because of my disability, sexuality, Catholicism, Irish background, and Polish background,” he says. “It’s my lesson for this life.”
Today, he wants to raise awareness about the discrimination the disabled face in such areas as handicap parking, housing, and nursing-home care.
“We all run into obstacles,” Bielicki says. “We all have to be advocates for ourselves. We all have to speak up for what we believe.”
Magdalena Hernandez, MBA’02
Eye for film
Chris Teague’s thriving movie career is due to his vision. Literally.
Teague, AS’02, is a cinematographer, also known as a director of photography, the person in charge of cameras and lighting
on a film set—who, more than anyone else, determines what the lens actually captures.
He’s already had a taste of the big time. Teague served as the director of photography on the indie film Children of Invention, which was selected for the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.
Is the Park City, Utah, glamourfest all it’s cracked up to be? Yes and no, says Teague: “Sundance is a mix. It’s fun and exciting, but also overwhelming. There’s pressure to network and meet people.”
A cinema-studies major at Northeastern, Teague went on to earn an MFA in film at Columbia University. He’d minored in photography at Northeastern, so when his classmates
needed someone to shoot their films, he answered the call, and taught himself cinematography shot by shot.
Now Teague wants to stretch himself as a director. He wrote and directed Thorndike, his thesis film, which screened at several festivals and won a New Line Cinema Development Grant. Another project he directed, Monkeywrench, is the shorter version of a featurelength movie he’s currently working on.
Short films are tough to make, Teague reports. “Shooting a longer film is easier,” he says. “You need time to get momentum. ‘Longer’ means more time to collaborate.
“Collaboration,” Teague adds, “is what gets me most excited.”
Magdalena Hernandez, MBA’02