EDUCATION AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT
A Delta Lambda Brother Takes His Seat at One of the Nation’s Top Business Schools
By: Bro: Tommy de Jongh
Getting into the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business is hard. Getting in on a full scholarship, with two of the most competitive fellowship designations in graduate business education, is something else entirely. Henry Kenney III, a member of Delta Lambda’s Fall 2023 line, did exactly that, and he has spent the past year making clear he intends to earn every bit of it.
Darden is consistently ranked the top public business school in the country, known nationally for its rigorous case method curriculum and its culture of collaborative learning. Students do not simply read about business decisions; they are placed inside them, dissecting thousands of real-world cases across two years of intensive study. The program demands a particular kind of intellectual stamina, one that asks students to be prepared, curious, and willing to defend their thinking in a room full of equally prepared peers. Brother Kenney has thrived in that environment.
His path to Charlottesville was shaped by two prestigious honors. As a Consortium Fellow, Brother Kenney is part of a decades-old network dedicated to advancing diversity and inclusion in business education, connecting graduate students across the country’s top MBA programs with each other and with companies committed to building more equitable organizations. His selection as an MLT Fellow, through Management Leadership for Tomorrow, placed him among a cohort of high-achieving professionals of color being intentionally developed for senior leadership. Together, the two fellowships covered his tuition in full and signaled, before he had sat in a single class, that the field had already taken notice.
Brother Kenney is concentrating in marketing and management consulting, with his sights set on brand strategy at the Fortune 500 level. It is a space that rewards both analytical precision and cultural fluency, the ability to understand not just what consumers buy, but why they trust one name over another and what it takes to build something lasting. Those are questions that have animated the best brand builders of the past century, and they are the questions Brother Kenney is training himself to answer.
This upcoming summer offers an early look at what that future holds for Bro. Kenney. He was recently offered a position at Church and Dwight Co. as a Brand Management Intern, working inside one of the most quietly powerful consumer goods portfolios in the country. Church and Dwight is the parent company behind Arm and Hammer, OxiClean, Therabreath, and a roster of other household names that move billions of dollars in product each year with relatively little fanfare. Learning brand management inside that kind of operation, where the work is unglamorous and the stakes are real, is the kind of education no classroom fully replicates.
On campus, he has made himself useful at every turn. He serves on the Student Admissions Committee, helping evaluate the next class of Darden students with the same rigor that was applied to his own application. He chairs the outreach committee for his section, contributes to the Black Business Student Association, and sings with the UVA Chamber Singers, a reminder that professional development and cultural life are not competing demands but complementary ones.
As he enters his second and final year, Brother Kenney will add mentorship to his already full plate, guiding incoming first-year students through the same transition he navigated a year ago. He will also participate in university recruitment, helping identify the next generation of students who belong at Darden. It is the kind of investment that tends to travel forward in time, passing from one person to the next until the chain of it becomes impossible to trace back to any single source. Delta Lambda is proud to know where this particular chain begins.
Author Bio: Bro. Tommy de Jongh is currently the Associate Editor for the Delta Lambda Chapter. He works full-time as an IT consultant and part-time as an Air Force Officer for the Department of Defense. His initiation chapter is Delta Lambda as well, and he crossed in October 2023.