10-07-2025
Creative ‘bliss': How this tech ed director achieves work-life balance
When he was assigned to create a business card for his future self in the 8th grade, Dan Stabb's said 'therapist and comedian.'
It turned out to be more true than he'd imagined: The 45-year-old Zip Code Wilmington director of admissions and professional development spends a lot of time counseling adult students to prepare for a new life as a technologist — and when he's not doing that, he's doing improv as director of City Theater Company's Fearless Improv troupe and landing voice acting gigs.
'When I wrote that, I didn't actually think that was going to happen,' Stabb told
When it came time for college, Stabb, who grew up in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, and attended high school at Archmere Academy, chose neither direction, instead aiming for a career in video production. He realized early on that it wasn't the field for him, and shifted to a journalism major. After graduating from Widener University, he turned a work-study job in its international office into a post-college career in higher education.
'I was 23 years old, working in this position, not having any idea what I was doing,' he said. 'And I thought at the time, 'this is just kind of a placeholder job until I find what I really want to do.''
He would work there for 11 years, plus another four as Harcum College's director at its Center for International Programs, before landing at Zip Code Wilmington in 2018.
Today, Stabb helps aspiring technologists achieve their career goals, as Zip Code Wilmington evolves with AI, including a new AI training course for business professionals, while maintaining a creative outlet he first discovered in childhood.
In this edition of How I Got Here series, Stabb talks about finding your bliss, and balancing the things you love.
This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
So you were a theater kid?
Totally. I actually did TV commercials when I was a kid. I would travel to Philly every now and then for auditions. Remember Mr. Good Buys? It was a hardware store, and I did a commercial for that when I was 7 or 8. And I did an industrial commercial for Mack Trucks. I was the kid that asked my dad and my grandpa all the questions. I made 600 bucks, which was the most I made in decades of acting.
At the time, my mom was a stay-at-home mom, so she was able to take me to auditions. Then she started to work full time, so it was a lot harder. That's when she got me into local theater at the Players Club in Swarthmore. I was hooked. I did theater for about 13 years before eventually doing mostly improv, and then eventually voiceover.
How did you wind up with Zip Code Wilmington?
Funny story, my now wife and three stepsons were playing chip-and-putt golf somewhere, and she looks over and sees this hoodie. And she goes, 'Zip Code Wilmington, what's that?' And I have no idea, but it kind of sounds cool. About a month later, I go online, and I see this job for admissions manager, and I mention it to my wife. She goes, 'That's the hoodie!'
'You get to be the author of your own story. Nobody else gets to write that story for you.'
Dan Stabb, Zip Code Wilmington
They were looking for somebody who had higher ed experience, and I was very fortunate that I got the role. And then about two or three months into the job, I realized that [working in admissions], once they became students, I wasn't working with them anymore. I realized how much I missed working with students. The executive director at the time, Melanie Augustine, said, 'Why don't you sit in on our professional development session and maybe help them with their elevator pitches?'
I started sitting in and contributing more. And she said, 'You have experience with coaching, why don't you coach some of the students on interviewing?'
The first student I coached — and I'm not taking credit for this — was the first one to get a job out of the cohort. I was like, this is really, really cool. Then over time, it just became part of my work.
When did you start doing voice acting?
2020. I had done improv for 16 or 17 years. I had been with a group called Better than Bacon for about nine years, until 2017. Then [a couple of years later] I joined Fearless and got like six months of regular performing again. And when COVID happened, my performance outlet was gone, and I was going crazy, because I just need that.
Maybe 15 years before, I had done private voiceover coaching with a guy who'd worked for Mel Blanc. But he lived in Northeast Philly, and the haul was just too much for me, so I didn't stick with it very long. So when I was trying to figure out how to perform, voiceover just popped in my brain. I eventually got linked with Rob Holt, a coach out of King of Prussia. He was doing virtual classes when Zoom was just starting to become a thing.
I took one class, and I was hooked. I became that student who, when we didn't have class, I was emailing him, and I was trying out different things. I was really enamored with the whole art form of it. We created a booth in my office made of PVC pipe and blankets to isolate the sound. Over time, it became a nice side gig for me.
Before COVID, you needed to live near New York or LA. There were some people doing it remotely, but not many. Studios were not really accepting of remote voice actors. COVID definitely shifted that. I have a couple of clients in Europe, and some out in LA.
It's sort of an inversion of what we often see, where people pivoted in 2020 because they needed work. Here it was about creativity.
I hope everybody finds their bliss. If that's their job, wonderful. I love my job. I also know I love and need this other outlet as well, because it keeps me grounded. I'm a relatively introverted person, but when I'm up there on stage, I just feed off that energy. I've been doing improv now for 21 years, and there is not a single point during that time whenI didn't want to do it. And now I'm putting voiceover in that same yeah category — I hope I do this for the rest of my life.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to find their bliss?
I think first and foremost, just do it. And when I say do it, I mean, try it, and the first thing might not stick. The second or third thing might not stick. It took a while for me to find my bliss in all of this.
Being in a creative field, you deal with rejection a lot. All those rejections have gotten me calloused — not calloused where I'm dismissive of it, but it's like, OK, move on to the next thing.
My advice to everybody is take a chance on yourself. I know it sounds a little bit cheesy, but I said no to myself a lot over time, and what I ultimately realized is that I was really the only person in my own way. That ties into Zip Code, because so many of our students are second career students, many of whom always wanted to do tech. I've had so many students saying 'I was told I can't do it.' And as I told many of them:
You get to be the author of your own story. Nobody else gets to write that story for you.
