A Day in the Life: Urban Public School Reformer

Read Janel Forde’s archived tweet feeds here: Day 1 and Day 2

In the next two weeks, we welcome alumna Janel Forde who will post about another career path in education – urban public school administration. Follow @PennCareerDay on Twitter on November 8th, and then again the week of November 15th. Don’t miss out on what Janel’s days are like!

Janel Forde, W '01

Janel works for Chicago Public Schools (CPS), the third largest school district in America with over 400,000 students, almost 700 schools and a $6bn operating budget. For the past year, Janel has worked in the CEO’s Office as the Director of Stimulus Programs. In that role she served as the district’s single point of contact for all stimulus related initiatives and helped to develop the state’s Race to the Top application ($400M) as well as the district’s Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) grant which was the district’s largest competitive grant award to date, $34M. She has also led several strategic projects for the office. Prior to joining the district, Janel was a consultant in the Boston Consulting Group’s Chicago office. She specialized in the financial services sector and functionally in process management and strategy development.

Originally, from the east coast, Janel has worked in marketing and business development at American Express and in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, all in New York. Janel earned her MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and her undergraduate degree from The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.

A Day in the Life of a Penn Entrepreneur

Read Rich Cisek’s archived tweet feed here: http://www.vpul.upenn.edu/careerservices/RichCisek_Feed.pdf

Energy Efficiency Entrepreneur and SEAS ’93 Alum, Rich Cisek is our first alumnus featured on our newest initiative @PennCareerDay (http://twitter.com/PennCareerDay).

Rich Cisek is the Founder and CEO of Green Home Energy Management, a company that specializes in solutions for utilities to help consumers better manage energy costs.  The Green Home solution consists of proprietary monitoring hardware and specialized data analysis software.  This product helps individual consumers reduce their energy use and in addition it aggregates data so that utilities can help all consumers learn how to better manage energy costs.   Green Homes is currently conducting field trials and raising venture financing.

Rich has a deep background in product development and operations.  Rich graduated from Penn with a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering in 1993 and he also has an MBA from the Wharton School.  Early in his career he designed air traffic control solutions for Lockheed Martin, followed by various operations and business development roles for America Online where Rich played a significant role in launching AOL’s broadband service.  Prior to founding Green Home Energy Management, Rich served in various senior leaderships roles at Comcast including the general manager for Comcast.com where he had responsibility for the overall site user experience and online sales.

This is your chance to find out what a typical, or not so typical, day is in the world of an entrepreneur focused on energy.  If you have questions for Rich, @reply to @PennCareerDay and check back here for his answers at a later date.