(Name Withheld)(back to contents)
My immediate post-MBA career goals center around my desire to eventually open a small consulting firm specializing in Change Management, Communications and Instructional Design (Training and Development). My education and career to date have helped me to shape these goals, and an MBA degree from the Cox School of Business will be a primary component in helping me to achieve these goals.

Guiding my clients through change has been an important theme in the path of my career. My clients have ranged from CEOs of Fortune 500 companies and professional athletes to county commissioners and 17-year-old high school juniors. My interaction with these clients has taken me from the cornfields of western Nebraska and the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee to the remotest islands of the Philippines and the Lapland flatlands of Sweden, near the Arctic Circle. In the course of working with these assorted clients and their varying cultures, I have found that change is the one central recurring theme that must always be addressed. Change is the constant in not only life, but also in the world of business. It is how that change is addressed that can determine the path to either success or failure.

While working as the assistant director of admissions at Southern Methodist University, I found that, to sell the University to prospective students and their parents, it was essential to create an environment that was conducive to change. Students wanted to feel comfortable in their new surroundings. Parents wanted to be reassured that their sons and daughters would be taken care of in their new environments. My goal was to remove as much uncertainty as possible about Southern Methodist University through active and continued communication throughout the college admissions process. I am proud of the fact that when I left SMU, it had reached its highest enrollment of the preceding 22 years, and that the five states with the highest yields in the incoming first-year class were all states which I was directly responsible for recruiting.

When I was charged with assisting the county auditors and treasurers offices in a transition of technology that would help bring the county infrastructure out of the 1950s, once again, it was active and effective communication that led the way to the first technology implementation in the history of the county that would go live one month ahead of schedule. The look in the eyes of the 54-year-old county road and bridge superintendent, who had never used a computer to do his job, was very similar to the look in the eyes of the 17-year-old high school junior from Grand Island, Nebraska, who had never envisioned transitioning from the safety of his childhood hometown to the uncertainty of Texas.

This past year, I once again saw the same look of fear in the eyes of a 47-year-old partner, as I attempted to explain our new approach to managing the relationships of our business consulting clients. This new methodology, which would fundamentally change the way in which we approach our clients, was the most extensive change to be implemented within the firm in the history of its existence. Never before had the firm attempted to initiate a global training roll-out of such magnitude. It was the fact that we took the time and the effort to make the partners and managers comfortable with the new approach to business that contributed to the success of the project.

It is my goal to open a consulting firm that specializes in Change Management, Communications and Instructional Design. I am confident that the skills that I would develop at the Cox School’s MBA program will help to prepare me for the challenges that await, as I set forth to achieve these goals.

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