The Eller Community : Alumni Profile

Eller MBA Alumni Profiles Zach Davis, MBA '06 Anne Durazo, MBA '06 Corey Hill, MBA '01 Robin Meeks, MBA '06 John Stewart, MBA '05

John Stewart, MBA '05

“My most valuable experiences happened to me during my internship and in the entrepreneurship program.”

After earning his Eller MBA with a concentration in entrepreneurship, John Stewart secured a position with BP Global. He is currently based out of Luanda, Angola.

Takeaways from Eller:

My most valuable experiences happened to me during my internship and in the entrepreneurship program. I did an internship on technology transfer at an optical research institution in Mexico. I was the project leader of a six-person team, consisting of three MBAs, one engineer, one optics scientist, and one undergraduate business student. We represented three different nationalities and worked in a multi-lingual environment, speaking English, Spanish, and Russian. Besides the academic challenges that the internship presented, we learned (by necessity) to manage the close-quarters, cross-disciplinary diversity inherent in our team and our working environment so that the product of these factors were better, not worse, deliverables.

During those nine weeks, we became a real team, evaluated more than 40 different research projects and conducted in-depth feasibility studies on two of the projects. One of those projects was later adopted by an undergraduate business team in the Eller entrepreneurship program and it became a full business plan. The internship was an intense life experience for all of us -and we are still a team; I feel like every time we get together, though we are spread to the four winds, we are always celebrating our shared success in Mexico.

The Entrepreneurship program was another memorable experience overall, again owed to the quality of the people I worked closely with throughout my entire second year. I think about the process we went through to develop our own business plan in the entrepreneurship program, which was centered around an oil leak detection technology that caught the interest of angel investors and various US pipeline companies. BP of Long Beach, Calif., expressed interest in having us test the product on a stretch of pipeline that they were about to replace as part of their preventive maintenance procedures, and had we had a working prototype at the time, we would have done so.

What an Eller MBA has done for me:

Currently I'm making 3.5 times more in yearly salary than I was with my bachelor's degree, largely due to my MBA. It puts me in the game with other business professionals who have more experience, and helps tremendously in quickly making up for a lack of experience through being able to better learn and apply new skills and concepts to business problems. A senior vice president at a major casino in Las Vegas told me that I didn't need my MBA to start working there, but I would need it to advance to upper management. Other potential employers have echoed that thought since then.

Advice for incoming MBAs:

First, an MBA is not a panacea. An MBA will give you tools to gather and analyze new information, but it more importantly should give you experience in wisely managing information, as well as how to deal with ambiguity. Remember that it's a toolkit and not a substitute for common sense. For two years you develop and practice applying that toolkit, just like a mechanic, sculptor or carpenter would consider which tools to use only after they understood the situation. Second, always reach out to your teachers --the advantage of doing an MBA full-time as opposed to part-time or online is that you have much more access to your teachers, and they are there to help you. Even though you won't click with them all, interaction with them will help you to get a better understanding of the subject matter, and among them you will probably find a mentor or two. I did. Finally, always be ready to try as many new things as you can, even at the risk of spreading yourself too thin. We all entered the program because we felt that we lacked something -the weight and prestige of an MBA, a more rigorous academic experience that better prepared you to handle real-world problems, new job opportunities or career advancement, etc. But whatever you were looking for, you may find something else entirely, such as making a career change when you thought you were looking for advancement in your current career, or vice versa, so keep an open mind.

 
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