Destination Success | Dakota Tameling

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May 06th, 2026

Destination Success | Dakota Tameling

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Chapters & Transcript

0:00

I graduated from High Point University in the class of 2022. I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and now I'm an analyst for JPMorgan Chase downtown Chicago.

0:22

For me I was so fortunate to grow up in a home in Chicago where we were in a Christian home. Those values were kind of locked in there from the very beginning. It was something that was important to me. The love, the respect, the service—those were integral to our family and that's the way that we wanted to kind of live our lives.

Coming to a place like High Point where those things are very much continued allowed High Point to feel like a kind of a far branch of home.

0:46

I started in high school as a pretty serious musician. So when I got to HPU I was kind of debating whether or not it was going to be a sales major or if I was going to be a music major. I kind of really narrowed it down—the fact that I knew I wanted to go towards the business track.

I had a couple great mentors and just peers who are a couple steps down the road ahead of me who were part of the investment club. They took me under their wing and kind of helped me find that this was something that I was interested in pursuing.

I was president of the Floyd T Craven Investment Club at High Point for two years, so I had a lot of great mentors and great coaches along the way.

1:19

It's honestly a really unique aspect and it kind of falls under High Point's life skills idea—that students who are pursuing a career in the financial services industry should have an opportunity to actually put it into practice.

So I always said when I had the opportunity to run the investment club, we kind of had two goals. Number one and most importantly, since it's just an experiential learning thing, this is an opportunity for people to just be in the room where it happens—to help make decisions and to have the opportunity to be hands-on.

The second prong was to make money—it's an opportunity to pursue excellence as you know, choose to be extraordinary, let's do a good job running this fund. It was an opportunity to kind of do both of those, and I was fortunate to do that over my four years at High Point.

2:00

Life skills are the basis of so much that you do in the workplace, right? You can have technical acumen, but it's the life skills—the things that you're applying every day in the office, the way that you're working with people, working on a team, the way that you're anticipating problems, learning to be flexible in the way that you solve them—those are kind of the life skills, the practical skills that really set people apart.

There's a much bigger perspective that I think a lot of people miss out on that High Point gets. It's not just this first job out of college—what is this preparing me for down the line? See the bigger picture, invest in yourself, invest in your future. It's so much more of a formative experience when you do it that way.

2:35

That mantra of being able to choose to be extraordinary, to lean into that—it's kind of the fuel for the fire that you need to work hard. You know, to crank out those Excel spreadsheets at 10 o'clock, whatever that is for you and your career field, it is really the fuel that allows you to be like, you know what, I'm going to do this because in the long term I see that this is so good for me.

Dakota Tameling, a High Point University graduate from the class of 2022, shares how HPU prepared him for his current role as an analyst at JPMorgan Chase. Through mentorship, hands-on experience with the investment club, and emphasis on life skills, HPU provided him with both technical knowledge and practical interpersonal abilities essential for success in the workplace. Tameling credits the university's culture of choosing to be extraordinary as the driving force behind his continued pursuit of excellence in his career.