York High grad quit Wall Street to earn Harvard and MIT degrees ... then change the world
Kim StrongAfter six years as an investment banker on Wall Street, Shapri Generette had an enviable life, but it wasn't enough.
She had paid off all her debt, concentrated on getting healthier and helped her family back in York when they needed it.
“I lived very comfortably and nothing was wrong with life, but I didn’t feel like I was making a positive impact on the world," said Generette, a 2007 William Penn graduate and the salutatorian of her class.
She told her parents, Mac and Elaine Smallwood-Generette of York, that she wanted to blow up her life and get her master's degree. Their response: Are you sure?
She was sure.
If she landed a spot at a prestigious university, she thought, she could learn about entrepreneurship while building an idea to help people across the country.
“I could re-position myself,” she said. She started in the MBA program at MIT in the fall of 2016, then applied to Harvard's master's of public administration track. She started there in the spring of 2017.
She thought she could adjust her trajectory and move from her work in real estate investment banking into a socially conscious career that helped people buy homes affordably.
But the path took an unexpected turn in the last year of her dual master's programs as a health scare threatened everything.
The infection
Mac Generette drove his daughter Shapri back to Massachusetts in the fall of 2018 with a heavy heart.
Something was causing her to lose her balance; she couldn't walk in a straight line. She didn't feel right. He feared that a disability was rising in her. Disabled people can still have fulfilling lives and successful careers, he said, but she was so young and had made it so far. Why now? Why her?
"I had a moment where, coming back from Boston, pretty much tears ran down my face the whole way back wondering about her," he said. "She couldn’t lift anything, and she couldn’t walk very far. I said, 'Lord, have your way. Show some grace and mercy for her.'"
She didn't tell many people at school, although some noticed she was struggling and stepped in to offer support, she said. “Even for graduation, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to walk across the stage and both schools said: No, you’re going to participate. We’re going to figure this out,” she said.
It wasn't until a few weeks ago, when the Generettes drove to Cambridge to see their daughter receive both degrees that they saw the transformation. She was using a walker to keep her feet steady on uneven ground and pavement, but she was better. Much better.
She had seen a doctor nearly a year earlier, and he finally diagnosed her in February with a neurological infection. Medicine and treatment to retrain her brain how to walk have put her in a better place.
"The good thing is that my doctor told me that it usually affects people cognitively," she said, but in her case, he could see she was still performing at a very high level.
Generette performed at such a high level that, in those three years of schooling, she and one of her classmates, Visraant Iyer, had grown an idea into a business plan.
A social conscious awakens
Generette and Iyer's company is Chord, a "millennial approach to home owning," according to their website.
The idea is this: In the world of real estate investment banking that Generette lived in for six years, she had clients who built big commercial buildings, “but they never made those purchases with all that cash on hand.”
By using the common way that commercial real estate is purchased - cash and a partnership investment - Chord wants to offer that same opportunity to people buying a home.
“There’s a lot of risk that you take when you buy a home," she said. To get into a mortgage, a homeowner needs a down payment then a large mortgage. Chord would look for sponsors to take on a portfolio of house investments across the country, essentially taking on the debt with the homeowner. It would lower the down payment and lower the monthly mortgage.
"That’s kind of where that marriage of my business and the socially responsibility comes together," she said.
"She was taught to give back," Mac Generette said. "It’s something I was taught. ... Just don’t ever forget where you come from."
Where she came from
On her mother's side, Generette is a part of the Smallwood family, a large and successful clan in York that traces back to James Smallwood, who came to York from Philadelphia, elected as a teacher at a school for black children in 1871. The James Smallwood Schoolhouse, which no longer stands, was named for him.
Wm. Lee Smallwood, who died earlier this year, was Generette's uncle and a long-serving member of York City Council. Her mother is a coordinator at Taylor Communications, formerly Standard Register. Her older brother, Chuck Maxfield Jr., works at Crispus Attucks.
On the Generette side, Mac Generette's mother moved to York from Bamberg, S.C., as part of a movement of many families from Bamberg to York.
"My mother had a college degree in nursing, but when she came to Pennsylvania, at that time, they weren’t hiring black nurses," Mac Generette said. His father graduated from Tuskegee University, and one of his sisters is a doctor. He is also a college graduate who now works for the state as a program analyst for drug and alcohol programs.
How do they feel about their daughter getting dual degrees this year: "Very, very, very proud," Elaine Smallwood-Generette said.
Where now?
It will take about a year for Shapri Generette to recover from her neurological infection, and she'll need good health insurance to do it. So, she's taken a job with BCG, a global management consulting firm in Dallas, Texas, to recover completely and get more practical knowledge for a couple of years.
She's living in York until she starts that job in late July.
Meanwhile, her business partner, Iyer, has moved to Denver, Colo., where Chord has been awarded $125,000 to incubate the business longer and present findings to a large audience in a year.
She hopes to build that business to the point that she can sell it and become a venture capitalist investing in other socially impactful businesses.
Looking back on her first years in the financial sector, she felt overwhelmed, fearing "they let me in by accident," she said, laughing. She found people over-assume, at times, a lack of knowledge, but now that she's holding dual degrees (and an engineering degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology), "people give me the benefit of the doubt."
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