Alumni Profiles

B.S., Business Management with minors in Money & Finance and Human Resources Law & Management, 2006

Principal Representative, Assurant Employee Benefits

Atlanta, Ga.

To watch an interview with Kyle, click here.

Kyle Kiser is what you could call a Football Player Plus. For many years, he was defined by his football skills and achievements. These days, just a couple of years after graduating from Guilford College, Kyle is a former college athlete, a successful businessman, a musician who plays paying gigs around the country, a volunteer for Big Brothers Big Sisters and — if you ask some special orphans on the island of Haiti — an American who cares.

“When I was growing up,” says Kyle, “I had a diverse group of friends. But they were just my friends. They were who they were, period. It was Guilford College that opened my eyes, that taught me to question why my friends’ lives were different from mine and what role my life plays in making things the way they are.”

Kyle says that he learned to approach every person and every situation with tolerance and with understanding, and he is grateful for that knowledge. It has guided him well in his professional career and in his personal life … even in Haiti, where he and some friends of his have taken on an orphanage as a special cause. “We’ve been there twice and to a displaced Haitian community in the Abaco Islands twice so far,” he says. “We’re doing all we can to support the orphanage, a home for 5- to 18-year old kids in Port-Au-Prince.”

The beauty of Haiti, located in the sparkling waters of the Caribbean, is equaled or exceeded by the squalor of its poverty-ridden inhabitants, and the youngest citizens often suffer the most. The inhabitants of the orphanage where Kyle and his friends volunteer their time, labor and resources have all been rescued from the streets of Port-Au-Prince and surrounding areas — rescued from filth, crime, disease, violence and palpable pollution. Kyle can’t fix the country; he does what he can for those orphans.

Social responsibility wasn’t the reason Kyle went to Guilford originally. He went there for football. He’s still highly competitive (don’t for a minute think that he’s not), but he grew into a different person at Guilford College … much more tolerant, compassionate, intellectually curious.

His Guilford College story actually began in his high school years: “When I was in high school I was recruited by Guilford and other colleges to play football. I chose a larger school than Guilford, went there my freshman year, and, well, I had some injuries and I was very lazy. I accomplished basically nothing.” So he stepped back, refocused himself and realized that he needed structure, challenges, discipline.

“Guilford still wanted me to play football, so I decided to try it again, see what it was like at a smaller school. And when I enrolled at Guilford, there was no question that playing football was the most important reason for my being there. Absolutely. But when I graduated, three years later, football was just one of many great things that had happened to me, all equally important factors in my development.”

Kyle says that the college was only 30 minutes from his parents’ home, but “it was different enough to push me out of my comfort zone. It made me interact with all sorts of people, the kinds of people whom I never had the opportunities to interact with before going to Guilford. And it was terrific.”

In fact, he says, “I enjoyed the Guilford College bubble — a great group of happy, open-minded people all learning from each other.” And, he adds, the development of his intellectual curiosity means a better career today: “I made a very important discovery at Guilford. I learned that the outstanding relationships among the students and professors was something that I could really benefit from, but — and it’s a big ‘but’ — only if I gave it 100 percent. In fact, in the beginning I missed out on a lot of it, just through not participating.”

He adds that people at the larger school he attended his freshman year “didn’t care if you participated. They didn’t even care if you showed up. No one noticed. At Guilford, everyone notices.”

The reason that the class participation was important, says Kyle, is that “those experiences gave me the skills to interact well with all kinds of people. And today, here I am in sales. I need to communicate effectively with everyone I come into contact with. It’s my living.”

Kyle played in a three-person band at Guilford, and he’s now the guitar-playing lead singer of a primarily bluegrass band called “Well Strung” (http://www.myspace.com/wellstrungmusic), appearing recently at clubs in Atlanta, Louisiana and Nashville.

Kyle offers great advice to anyone considering enrolling at Guilford. He says that what you will gain from the experience is, as with most things, dependent on what you put in. “You need to take the opportunities for growth that Guilford offers; you need to make the choices and do the work.” Then Kyle says this: “You definitely will learn two things. One, you’ll learn that your way is not the only way, and two, you’ll learn that number one is a good thing."