Describe a moment when you realized HES had changed your career opportunities or career path?
There’s a version of my life where I go back to corporate America. It’s not hard to imagine — I had spent 12 years at Dell Technologies, I knew how to succeed in that world, and that world paid well. When I enrolled at HES, I still had one foot in that lane. I wasn’t sure I was ready to bet everything on the entrepreneurial path.
Harvard changed the calculus. Not in a single dramatic moment, but through the slow accumulation of what happens when rigorous academic thinking collides with real-world ambition. The coursework — particularly in marketing, strategy, and innovation — gave me frameworks to evaluate what I was actually building with my companies, iNERDE and KonsultIQ.
More importantly, it gave me the confidence to trust my own analysis. At some point, I stopped asking “should I go back?” and started asking “how far can I go?” That shift happened at HES.
The moment I can point to is quieter than people expect. I was working through the Platforms and Artificial Intelligence course and I mapped iNERDE’s business model against what I was studying — and I saw, clearly, that what I had built had real architecture. It wasn’t a passion project. It was a scalable system with defensible logic. I didn’t need a corner office to validate that, I needed to finish building it.
How has your Harvard Extension School experience helped you throughout your career journey? How do you expect it to impact your next steps?
What HES gave me wasn’t just a credential. It was a lens.
I began my degree as someone who had spent over a decade solving complex technical problems at Dell. I knew how to operate inside large systems. What HES taught me was how to design them. That distinction matters enormously when you’re a founder; operating inside someone else’s structure requires competence, but building your own requires something closer to vision — and vision needs scaffolding to become real.
Every course sharpened my ability to think about ventures not just as missions, but as institutions. The academic rigor pushed me to stress-test assumptions I had been carrying for years. When my thinking held up under that pressure, I trusted it more. When it didn’t, I rebuilt it — better.
As for what comes next: I’ve competed as a finalist in the 2026 Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge with a shot at a $75,000 grand prize, positioning my EdTech platform iNERDE Academy to reach one million young people across francophone West Africa by 2030.
The Harvard network — the relationships, the credibility, the doors that open differently when you’ve done the work at this level — is a genuine accelerant for that mission. I didn’t come to HES to put a name on a resume. I came to become someone who could actually achieve my dream.
How did you fit your education into your life?
The short answer: imperfectly, intentionally, and with a lot of early mornings.
When I enrolled at HES, I was a Principal Engineering Technologist at Dell Technologies by day and a nonprofit founder building STEM programs across West Africa on nights and weekends. I was also commuting from out of state to meet the on-campus requirement — which is not a small thing when your schedule has no margin.
There was no clean window that said “graduate school goes here.” I carved one out, week by week, because the alternative was staying exactly where I was.
What I didn’t expect was how much the education would feed the work in real time. A framework studied on a Tuesday would sharpen a conversation with a partner on Friday. Research done for a paper on AI strategy would directly inform the architecture of my venture, KonsultIQ. HES wasn’t running parallel to my life — it was running through it, making everything more coherent.
By the time I completed my master’s degree program, I had launched a company, evolved a nonprofit into a Harvard PIC finalist, and earned this master’s degree — all simultaneously. That wasn’t comfortable. But it confirmed something I needed to know about myself: that I can hold the complexity. That matters more to me than the diploma.
Describe your Extension experience in one word:
Unleashed.
