Dakisha Allen, '04
Master of Business Administration
October 24, 2022
When Dakisha Allen was commuting to her job as a software engineer at NASA back in 2001, she passed University of Houston-Clear Lake every day. She knew many of her coworkers attended the university, so when it came time for her to decide where to pursue her Master of Business Administration, she looked at UH-Clear Lake and liked what she found.
Allen received her MBA from UH-Clear Lake in 2004 and began her career as a deal manager, and later a business systems analyst and project manager at JP Morgan Chase Bank. She later acquired a second master's in healthcare administration and last month, was appointed Head of Product at Yuvo Health.
In her new role at Yuvo Health, a healthcare company founded entirely by Black indigenous people of color, she is overseeing the company's product development while contributing to its growth and ensuring technology-solutions alignment with its target audiences.
"Our common goal at Yuvo is to bring fair, quality health care to underserved communities by providing relief of recurring administrative tasks to health centers so they can focus on providing care instead of on these tasks," she explained.
She said this new job was the culmination of many of her life's aspirations. She said she always wanted to live, get her education, and work in a diverse, multi-cultural environment.
"I am from a small city in Texas called Wichita Falls," she said. "It's not a very diverse community. When I moved to Houston, I was really looking for that diversity, and that is one of the things most important I found when I enrolled at UHCL."
Good communication skills are crucial to success, and Allen said it's one of the key lessons she learned during her time at UHCL.
"I learned how to communicate with people who are like me and not like me. Everyone is from a different background and they bring a different perspective. I had a computer science background when I started there, but not everyone did. In my MBA program, I learned to bridge that gap."
Being part of a diverse student population was also a critical element in her education at UHCL. "I was really looking forward to that diversity, and I found it at UHCL," she said. "I wanted to continue my education on that path and explore. It really helped because in my career, I have worked on teams with people from all over the world."
Now, in her leadership position at Yuvo Health, she sees many ways in which her academic experience at UHCL prepared her for her new career path. "I'm really well equipped for my new role," she said. "For the positions I've had till now, I have just stacked more knowledge on what UHCL taught me. I patterned a lot of what I have done in my career on what I learned there, and those were impactful lessons set me up for success."
UHCL has multiple, flexible MBA options. Learn more online.