You could say that Daniel Riley, recently retired after more than 30 years at Bank of America, owes his degree to a dare from his brother, Michael (MBA 80). Knowing how tough it would be to juggle a full-time career with earning a degree, Michael asked Daniel if he would be interested in enrolling in classes together as a sort of friendly competition.

"We're a year apart - he's a year older - and we've always done things to motivate one another. It's not easy when you're working full time to go to school at night for three or four hours - it's hard to stick to it, so we helped each other along," Dan Riley says. "He beat me to the finish line, but we both completed our MBA at GGU."

Born and raised in San Francisco, Riley graduated from St. Ignatius High School and began working at Bank of America shortly thereafter. He worked evening swing shifts full time while he earned his undergraduate degree, first attending City College and then transferring to San Francisco State University. After five years, he completed his degree, was promoted to supervisor and finally got to work the day shift. Then he began filling up his nights with graduate school. Of his time at GGU, Riley most recalls being impressed with the adjunct professors and the real-world practical experience they brought to the classroom.

After graduation, Riley admits he lost touch with GGU for a while: "There was no real outreach in either direction," he says. Eventually, however, he reconnected through the alumni office. In 2001, he attended an event at Bank of America with former CEO and president - and fellow GGU alumnus - Richard Rosenberg (MBA 63, JD 66, LLD 88) to meet with GGU president Phil Friedman. It was an informal way for the many alumni at BofA to connect with each other and with GGU.

"People are willing to get involved when they're asked," Riley says. "I was working in a business environment where I could take things I learned on the job and apply them to help the university reach its strategic goals."

Riley agreed to sit on the Edward S. Ageno School of Business advisory board, a group he has chaired for two years. During his tenure, the board advised the school on curricula, branding for its programs and ways the school could help prepare graduates to be more competitive in the marketplace.

In spring 2005, Riley was elected to begin serving on the university board of trustees. As a trustee, Riley says he hopes he can help GGU's leaders guide the university in the right direction for the future. Part of that guidance comes in his and his wife's decision to support The Centennial Campaign for GGU through an unrestricted multiyear financial gift.

"I'm happy to be back involved with GGU, and my wife and I are very happy to be supporters of education," he says. Riley and Irene, married 17 years, met at BofA, where she also worked for more than 30 years. Since their retirement, both stay active with community work, including her appointment by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom to the Housing Authority Commission, and seats on the boards of directors of Wu Yee Children's Services and the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation, and his involvement with United Way of the Bay Area. For the Rileys, pledging to support GGU was a no-brainer.

"There are a lot of reports that talk about how education affects lifelong earning, and I believe there's some truth to that," Riley says. "GGU was important to me and my career. The practical education I received helped me be more productive on the job. So giving back is a way of saying thank you for the education and thank you to the institution."

Riley hopes his gift will inspire others to donate, as well. "I think all alumni should get involved, to the extent that they can," he says. "From my perspective, we'd love to see more people involved in supporting the university's strategic goals. For the university to grow, we need the right classrooms and the right tools - if we can provide that, then the students will be our real ambassadors." -Daniel Nevers

"I got to a point in my life where I realized I wasn't getting where I needed to go. I was at a very social school, and I decided I needed to buckle down, get serious and find an institution that really focused on academics. GGU fit the bill. It had that single-minded focus of completing that degree," says Alan Hoefer Jr., about how he ended up completing his bachelor's degree at GGU after starting at a large public university in Arizona.

What was particularly important to him, he says, was the fact that the professors at GGU had real-world experience. "GGU was unlike other institutions that taught a lot of theory. I was at a point in my life - well, I wasn't the greatest student in the world. But the adjunct professors, the practical application, really turned me on. It drove me to excel, and it opened my eyes to what I could do for myself."

This newfound drive to succeed academically gave Hoefer the foundation to thrive after school, as well. After working with his father, Alan Sr., in his boutique investment firm, Hoefer began a consulting business, working primarily with early-stage technology companies. Until recently, he also owned and ran a restaurant. Since this past June, he has returned to work in the investment community as a strategic account manager for Frost & Sullivan, where he sells competitive-market-intelligence services to venture-capital and private-equity firms. Hoefer, his wife, Lisa, and his children, Alan Finn and Ava, live in Burlingame, Calif., just four blocks from his parents and close to his hometown of Hillsborough. With his family, Hoefer has been a donor to GGU for more than a decade through the Hoefer Family Foundation.

Initially, he recalls, the foundation got involved supporting the university library in the early '90s, when information was not as readily available as it is now. Institu-tional libraries were vitally important to the business community at that time, Hoefer says, and he remembers relying on GGU's library for investment research as a young businessperson after graduation. With the growth of the Internet, however, the foundation wanted to ensure its donations were keeping pace with the university's changing needs.

Sometime around 2001, "we sat down with President Friedman and asked what GGU was trying to accomplish," Hoefer recalls. "One thing in particular was helping adjunct professors get up to speed with GGU's plan to deliver instruction online. That sounded great to me. It helped GGU with a specific long-term goal, and it also cut to the heart of why I loved GGU in the first place: the adjuncts."

Through a multiyear endowment pledge to The Centennial Campaign for GGU, the Hoefer Family Foundation has funded the Hoefer Cyber-Technology Training Program with proceeds from the endowment's earnings. Along the way, Hoefer says, they made up any differences in the budgeting through additional gifts because "we wanted it to be fully funded from year one."

For Hoefer, who is also a member of the GGU Alumni Association board of directors, being a donor to GGU has been an overwhelmingly positive experience: "It has allowed me to get creative and to do something that will help improve the university over the longer term. This endowment will bring returns to GGU, the students and alumni, and the legal and business communities for the long haul. It's not just immediate gratification; it's going to be there forever." -Daniel Nevers