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Program Director and Instructor |
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Dr. Donna Gayle Smith is the first director of Texas A&M-Commerce‘s signature competency-based degree program, BAAS in Organizational Leadership. Since becoming the program director in 2014, she has focused on leveraging Texas A&M-Commerce‘s unique culture to serve adult learner and nontraditional student populations through close contact and personalized service, building relationships between administrators, faculty, staff, and students. In this process, Dr. Smith has created an environment that continually encourages students and is instrumental in increasing retention and persistence rates, and reducing the students’ time to degree completion.
Dr. Smith has been with the program since 2013 and was the founding academic success coach. Since its launch in January 2014, the program has seen a phenomenal growth rate of 20+% every seven-week term while maintaining an average 87% retention rate. In CBE circles, Dr. Smith has become nationally known for the personal attention and positive intrusive advising service she and her staff give to each and every student in the program.
Dr. Smith received her BBA and MBA from Texas A&M-Commerce and her Ph.D. in Higher Education from the University of North Texas. Prior to coming to TAMU-C, Dr. Smith worked in Fortune 500 corporate, nonprofit, and governmental organizations and has managed numerous multimillion dollar projects and operating budgets. She has also spent many years as a private consultant to small businesses, conducting numerous training seminars, conferences, and workshops, and offering a number of specialized services to both new and established small businesses, services such as setting up accounting systems, business planning, business analysis, operational efficiency studies, research and grant-writing. She has been an active member of the Paris Junior College Business Management Advisory Board, and a consultant/trainer with Small Business Development Centers and local colleges in Northeast Texas. Illustrative of her work, in 2012, she received a $200,000 competitive grant from the Texas Workforce Commission: Entrepreneurship Training Project to provide further entrepreneurship training to her clients. Dr. Smith has published a number of refereed journal articles, conference proceedings, conference presentations, and small business training materials related to all aspects of successful small business operations.