DLI 2009 Class Bios

Jesse Dame

Growing up in a small town in Northwest Indiana I always knew what it felt like to be a part of a community.  I also knew that I would need a first class education in order to succeed in the future, but my family did not have a lot of resources to send me to college.  Fortunately, I was able to piece together enough scholarships and grants to pay for the majority of my undergraduate education at DePauw University in Greencastle, IN. 

My time at DePauw seemed to make the world a much larger place compared to my hometown even though DePauw was itself a small school with just 2,500 students.  In my junior year, I was able to spend a semester studying abroad in Turkey, and my passion for exploring and traveling has only grown since then.  In 2004, I received my Bachelor of Arts from DePauw with a major in Classical Civilizations, which is a combination of ancient history, Latin language studies, and archaeology.  However, I took more philosophy classes than any other single subject.

After graduation, my first permanent position was in banking, and I’ve been a banker ever since.  After spending just a couple months working as a teller I was asked to train tellers, and I trained about 50 new hires over the next eight months for a family owned bank in Northwest Indiana.  After several promotions and experience in many areas of banking in a short period of time, I began my career in commercial lending.  I learned to underwrite all types of commercial loans ranging from $50,000 to $25 million for commercial real estate, equipment, and operating lines of credit. 

In 2007, I was introduced to the fantastic people at Desert Community Bank (DCB) in Las Vegas, where I have continued my career as a Commercial Loan Officer.  My first trip ever to Las Vegas was to meet the President of DCB and our Chief Credit Officer.  I wanted be become a part of the Las Vegas community, and I have always had a passion for service so I joined the Green Valley Kiwanis Club to serve children as soon as I moved to Las Vegas. 

In order to expand my business knowledge and develop some more business skills I began working towards a Master of Business Administration in 2006 at Valparaiso University in Indiana.  When I relocated to Las Vegas I continued working on my MBA at UNLV, and I’ll be graduating from UNLV in December, 2009 with concentrations in New Venture Management and Finance.  Most recently, a business plan written by myself and two teammates from UNLV was selected as a finalist in Nevada’s Governor’s Cup statewide business plan competition. 

NAIOP has been a perfect fit for me because of the local professional expertise of the members of NAIOP in Las Vegas.  Since entering the business world, I have found that I learn the most from people lots of experiences in their chosen fields.  I hope to continue to learn and meet new mentors and friends as a part of the DLI group going forward. 

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