2024 Convocation keynote Isaiah Nathaniel – event photos

Although the semester began a few weeks ago, the 2024 Convocation Ceremony on Sept. 24 officially proclaimed the start of the 2024-2025 Academic Year.

This year’s Convocation event brought home one of the University’s alumni sons – Isaiah Nathaniel, Class of 2004.

For images from the Convocation, click on the below link:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/48216028@N03/albums/72177720320570097

Mr. Nathaniel is the Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Delaware Valley Community Health, Inc., a Greater Philadelphia. Pa.-area system health facilities that specialize in providing healthcare to the underserved regardless of their ability to pay. He is also the owner and CEO of Calcom Technologies, an information technology company, and the owner and CEO of MadOptics Productions, a film production company that focuses on film, sports, and photography.

During keynote speaking time at the Convocation, Mr. Nathaniel told the largely freshman student audience about his time at Delaware State University.

Mr. Nathaniel said after arriving at DSU on a basketball scholarship, his early years as a student-athletes were a struggle – both on the Hornet men’s team and in the classroom. After receiving less than average grades in several courses, by his sophomore year, some soul searching was needed to get to the bottom of his sub-par results.

It was the history of Loockerman Hall, the oldest building on the DSU campus, that brought him around.

Upon reading the historic marker at Loockerman Hall, it became clear to him that he stood on sacred ground where slaves owned by the Loockerman family of the 1700s lived, worked and died. He came to understand the irony that the same grounds became Delaware’s only Historically Black Institution of Higher Education.

“I realized what the issue was,” Mr. Nathaniel said. “I realized I did not respect Delaware State University.”

Imbued with a greater appreciation of the school’s history, Mr. Nathaniel said he began adopting better habits that helped him improve his grades and get better results as a Hornet basketball player. He also changed his major to Management Information Systems and began studying with “intentionality.”

Mr. Nathaniel used a football stat – Yards After Catch, or YAC – as an analogy for how to respond to adversity. “After life gets hard, how many YAC yards will you have,” he said. “When it seems like you are in for a loss of yards, how will you stay upright and move forward through the obstacles seen and unseen.”

The DSU alumnus’ YAC propelled him to become a Dean’s List student, a valuable member of the Hornet basketball team who earned the DSU Athletics Leadership Award in his senior year and enabled him to graduate in four years.

The lessons he learned at his alma mater and his abiding faith in God have led him to professional award-winning achievements. He said he never stops crediting DSU for who he has become.

“At Delaware State University, I was able to fail, underachieve, and then succeed,” Mr. Nathaniel said. “It was because the professors here cared for me and helped me to realize who I was inside when I did not know myself and cultivated that.”

Mr. Nathaniel urged the Class of 2028 that ringed the Memorial Hall gymnasium to “be allergic to negativity and to be authentically you.

He added that if they take full advantage of this higher education opportunity, “Soon and very soon, each of you will walk across the stage and hear ‘Well done, my good and faithful student.”

Before DSU President Tony Allen officially proclaimed the official start of the school year at the end of the ceremony, the Convocation assembly heard encouragement from University officials and music performances by the DSU Band and Concert Choir.