Alum of the Year
Dr. Renee Jackson-Anderson & Dr. W. Darrell Walden - 2007
Dr. Renee Jackson-Anderson
Renee Jackson-Anderson, former assistant professor of merchandising and hospitality management at the University of North Texas, says she doesn't expect her students to leave her class knowing everything. She just expects them to be prepared to deal with real-world situations.
"My goal is to help develop strategists so they can meet their goals," says Jackson, assistant professor of merchandising and hospitality management who coordinates the e-merchandising program at UNT. She takes pride in her students and invests time and energy in making sure they are successful in both her classroom and the real world. She recently spent time with a student who was working on landing a career-changing internship with JCPenney.com. After seven months of pursuit and phone tag, the student was awarded the internship. Although it was a long and tedious process, Jackson-Anderson never stopped encouraging her.
"There is nothing that makes me prouder than seeing a student get an internship doing something they have worked so hard for," Jackson-Anderson says. It's from moments like those, when she sees "students get excited about their careers," that Jackson gets her reward for a job well done. She says some of her favorite UNT memories are of commencement ceremonies and the joy of cheering for her students.
Jackson-Anderson's students appreciate her teaching style because they always know where they stand, explains Tammy Kinley, assistant professor of merchandising and hospitality management. "A student told me last week that if Dr. Jackson-Anderson said the answer was ‘No' last week, it is still ‘No' today," Kinley says.
Kinley describes Jackson-Anderson as a strong member of the merchandising team. "Working with Dr. Jackson-Anderson is a real pleasure. I admire her consistency, dependability, honesty and integrity. She expects a lot from her students and they deliver," Kinley says. "She is a wonderful person to know."
Dr. W. Darrell Walden
Dr. Darrell Walden is an amatuer historian and associate professor of accounting and information systems in the Robins School of Business at the University of Richmond (UR). He is a widely published scholar, with expertise in cost and managerial accounting, environmental accounting, accounting information systems, E-commerce, and accounting education.
Dr. Walden earned his Ph.D. in Business with honors from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) where he majored in Accounting, and minored in Finance and Information Systems. Dr. Walden was among only 24 Blacks out of 1206 Ph.D.s in Business earned in 1993 (Blacks earned only 2% of these degrees in the 1990s). Prior to his tenure at UR, he taught at three other universities including VCU and the prestigious Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University-Provo UT.
Prior to his academic career, he became early in his career a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) licensed in Virginia and still consults with a number of firms in the central Virginia area today. His professional career experience has included work in the Controllers' staff and corporate tax departments of two Fortune 500 companies.
Dr. Walden is also co-founder of the Virginia Freedmen Project whose mission is to encourage and strengthen families, particularly those within the African American community, to discover their genealogy and family history (click here for more information). The Freedmen Project Team has linked the history and records of the Freedmen's Bureau and Freedman's Bank to African American genealogical research, a product of which is the highly acclaimed presentation "Whispers from the Dust: The Freedmen Records and African American Family History." The Freedmen Project Team is currently pursuing other research activities relating to the Freedmen records. Most recently helping to develop the "Virginia Freedmen Extraction and Indexing Project," which now is spearheaded by the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia along with their partners the Genealogical Society of Utah and Howard University.