While Daryle Whyte (ECE’91) has enjoyed tremendous professional success at big name companies — Amazon, IBM, and Wells Fargo Bank to name a few — the road to success wasn’t always obvious. 

“Purdue was a lesson in staying the course,” comments Whyte.

After his sophomore year, Whyte began to have doubts about whether or not the engineering program was the right fit.

“When I saw what other engineers were doing for their internships and jobs, I was thinking, ‘Wow, that’s not me, what am I going to do?’”

After visiting the IBM booth at a career fair on campus, however, the answer started to come into focus.

“They were interviewing engineers for tech sales positions and that sounded interesting to me,” shares Whyte. “I could match my technical skills with my business skills and personality. I was able to secure an internship with IBM where I worked for two summers.”

Matching his academic track to a career wasn’t the only challenge. Studying alongside legacy students who might already have parents who studied at Purdue or were engineers was intimidating.

“I was competing with others who already had that learning muscle and the skills that I lacked,” Whyte explains. “It was like starting a race after the gun sounded and then trying to catch up to them every single day.”

In addition to his successful academic record, Whyte served as the first black vice president of Purdue Student Government. As a freshman, Whyte played on the football team, and his sophomore year he competed as part of the wrestling team.

Looking back over his time at Purdue and the early years of his career, Whyte encourages others to act boldly.

“I was a bit intimidated about taking on new challenges that would stretch me in my early years,” says Whyte. “I never wanted to fail at something new. If I had to do it all over again, I would try to stretch my talents — either fail fast, or fail forward.”

Whyte is married to Shelley Hancock-Whyte, and the proud father to their late son, Christian A. Ewing (1997–2017), and daughters India Noelle (14) and Daryl Kennedy (11).