Daniel Nesseler ’23
MBA
As a professional soccer player in Germany, Daniel Nesseler figured it made sense to earn his bachelor’s in sport management and communication at the Deutsche Sporthochschule Köln (Cologne).
In the course of his studies, though, something began to shift: Even as he continued to play professionally, he started to envision a life beyond the soccer pitch.
“I slowly shifted from a sport focus to pure business administration. I really wanted to get the skills to make it in the world of business,” he says. With an interest in finance, he was drawn to LeBow’s robust mix of general business courses and niche electives — “things like business valuation or capital markets, something that is a little more specialized.”
“I always wanted to study abroad or to live abroad for a while,” he adds. With a scholarship offer and a chance to play NCAA Division I soccer for the Drexel Dragons, “this was a once-in-a-lifetime chance.”
Today he’s putting his graduate training to work as a senior consultant at Grant Thornton Germany, specializing in corporate financial matters.
“I’m in the area of transaction services advisory. We advise companies on both the buy side and the sell side,” he says.
In addition to mergers and acquisitions, “we also support the normal, usual financial services: internal and external reporting, business plans, financial modeling projects. It’s basically everything that is related to corporate finance and accounting.”
Nesseler said he loves the work, in part because it is grounded so solidly in reality. “People can be more optimistic or more pessimistic, but numbers don’t lie,” he says. Beyond that, he’s attracted to the sheer variety of tasks at hand.
“I work on projects that go on for four to eight weeks on average. That means I work on new projects every couple of weeks. I meet new people. And we are working in a lot of industries: Companies in healthcare, automotive, software. The range is very broad, and this makes it very interesting,” he says.
Nesseler recalls that a number of LeBow staff members were instrumental in helping him to adjust during his stay in the United States.
“When I started my MBA, I came in with the attitude of making the most out of it. [My advisor] introduced me to how to choose my course of study and which classes I should take based on what I wanted to get out of them. Her help in the decision-making process was so important to me.”
As he balanced his play for the Drexel Dragons men’s soccer team with his studies, he also worked to get his career moving with help from LeBow’s Graduate Career Services, now part of the Center for Career Readiness.
Nesseler’s LeBow experience also included participation in the Lawrie Advanced Global Leadership Program, which led directly to a pivotal internship with Adelphi Capital Partners, a boutique private equity firm in Philadelphia.
“I was able to support them in a lot of leveraged-buyout scenarios and investment opportunities, mostly focused on the construction industry,” he says. “That was the most helpful experience for getting into the position I’m in right now.”
Now back in Germany, Nesseler said he looks back on his time in Philadelphia as “one of the best times in my life so far, because I really got to know different cultures and different ways of thinking, and that’s always so valuable."