Danny Dorsel’s story is one that comes full circle. And the University of South Carolina, the S.C. Governor’s School for Science and Mathematics and the state are seeing the benefits.
While Dorsel was in 10th grade in Florence, South Carolina, the newly established Governor’s School, based in Hartsville, began recruiting, and one of his teachers recommended that he check it out. He and his family liked what they saw: a publicly funded boarding school for high achievers built upon a college model, with college-level teachers.
A couple years later, Dorsel was a member of GSSM’s first graduating class.
“There was tremendous growth intellectually, academically, but more importantly, in just getting to know myself and how to self-regulate,” Dorsel says. That transformative experience “changed my trajectory and changed how I approached where I was going.”
Dorsel was accepted to several major colleges, but USC offered a bit more, including the South Carolina Honors College. He was one of just 20 students to be named a Carolina Scholar — at the time, USC’s top scholarship. He also liked the idea of staying close to home and being part of another tightly knit, driven community.
“If you took the Honors College out of USC, it would mirror GSSM a lot,” he says. His college path was a bit circuitous, but in a good way. He changed majors, then studied abroad at the University of Kent in Canterbury, England. The program was typically reserved for juniors. Dorsel was a sophomore.
“That was a turning point for me,” he says. “I really fell in love with Carolina when I was away and wanted to get back.” He returned to the Horseshoe, conducted research as an undergraduate and finished in 1995 with a mechanical engineering degree.
After volunteering for a year as a high school teacher in the Caribbean, Dorsel earned a master’s in environmental engineering at Virginia Tech, then did a two-year stint in management consulting at PriceWaterhouseCoopers. “But I realized the business travel life wasn’t for me,” he says. “That’s how I got into education: I found a job in Hilton Head, South Carolina, teaching middle school science and math and running their athletic program. The money wasn’t there, but I took a leap of faith, abandoned two engineering degrees and followed what I really felt was my passion.”
Two years later, Dorsel returned to Columbia and spent four years at Cardinal Newman High School. He moved into school administration as a high school principal in Atlanta for six years and earned a master’s in educational administration from Notre Dame.
But his career started to circle back at a GSSM alumni reunion dinner in 2012 in Atlanta when he learned that his old school was looking for a new vice president for academics. By that time, he and his wife had two kids. His wife was from Columbia, and both of their families were in South Carolina. He had always wanted to move back, so he applied. And he got the job.
When the president’s position came open in 2020, Dorsel was asked to apply. He became his high school alma mater’s president in 2021. And like before, he’s right at home.
“There is no way to truly know the impact of anything unless you’ve been impacted by it,” he says. “I learned how to study here. I learned how to fail. I learned how to get back up. I learned how to ask questions. I learned all these things that I take into all aspects of my life, independent of career or academics. And I see that in our students now.”
There has been plenty of change at GSSM since 1990. The student body has increased from 128 students to 288, and it has its own campus now instead of being housed at Coker University. But the things students learn there are timeless.
And Dorsel is keenly aware of the school’s positioning within South Carolina. It serves as a major resource for outreach, promoting STEM subjects to thousands of K-12 students annually. It serves its student body by offering a college model with exemplary academic, research and extracurricular opportunities. And it serves the state by helping to keep bright minds within South Carolina’s borders.
That last part — retaining the state’s brightest minds — drove Dorsel and GSSM to work even more closely with his college alma mater. “We promote the in-state schools, but we, as a state, need to make the decision even harder for GSSM graduates to attend a university outside of South Carolina. And the decision usually is a financial one,” he says, insisting that you don’t have to leave the state to get a great education.
“I have to balance it when I talk to students because there’s a benefit to going out and coming back, but we have to make sure the ‘going out’ part is temporary. Even though I left the state for graduate school and a couple of jobs, there was no doubt in my mind that I wanted to end up in South Carolina.”
Dorsel teamed up with university President Michael Amiridis this year to put his talk into action. In March, USC and GSSM announced a new scholarship opportunity. GSSM grads who enroll as first-time, full-time students at USC Columbia, and who are named Palmetto Fellows by the S.C. Commission on Higher Education, will receive an annual $10,000 scholarship.
“Our mission is to develop leaders in science, technology, engineering and mathematics for South Carolina,” Dorsel said when the scholarship was announced. “This new scholarship strengthens the partnership between GSSM and the University of South Carolina and creates meaningful opportunity for our graduates to continue their academic journeys at the state’s flagship institution.”
