University of Missouri: Sean Richardson
Sean Richardson earned his BS in international finance from the University of Alabama. A member of Army ROTC, he was first commissioned as an armor officer just after graduating in 1999. Over the next decade his service included tank platoon leader in the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood, Texas; battalion logistics officer at Camp Casey in Korea; and tank company commander in Mosul, Iraq.
But even before finishing college, Richardson aspired to pursue an MBA one day. The chance came in 2007, when he was accepted in the Expanded Graduate School Program, or EGSP, through which the Army funded his MBA studies at the University of Missouri in return for a commitment to serve three additional years. At the same time, he was selected for a transition out of Armor into the Army Acquisition Corps as a senior captain. “I loved the Army, wanted to serve my country, and didn’t really want to get out,” he says. But he also wanted to make sure he would be marketable after his eventual military retirement.
Richardson, who has completed his graduate business degree, is now a major stationed in Seoul, South Korea. “An MBA actually lined up perfectly with my potential jobs within the Army Acquisition Corps, where I was chosen to be a contracting officer,” he says. “A lot of the skills I learned within the MBA program translated very well into what I’m doing now."
You had been thinking about graduate business school for a long time when you finally enrolled in your MBA program. Did it live up to your expectations?
It far and away exceeded my expectations. The emphasis of my studies was primarily in management. I had gotten a lot of leadership experience at a young age coming into the armor field in the Army, but something just clicked once I was back in school. I started to have a better understanding of management, organizational behavior, and organizational design. It was very eye-opening.
And I feel strongly that I gained a lot from actually being in a bricks-and-mortar institution as opposed to online courses only. I got the everyday interaction, the variety of opinions, the instant feedback from my peers, the myriad practical exercises and case studies, and, of course, everything my professors conveyed.
Did your military training help you make the transition back to school?
The discipline I built up over my years in the military is something I didn’t have when I was coming into an undergraduate program right out of high school. Now I’m used to working for extended hours under stressful conditions—and under some stress-inducing bosses. So getting up in the morning, seeing my kids off to school, and getting to class was not a big challenge. The workload was intensive but a lot more enjoyable than I anticipated.
How did your military experience help with your actual classwork?
You don’t work as an individual in the army—you always work as a team. So you’re used to brainstorming and arguing and coming up with ideas and putting things together into a final product for somebody higher up. And all that really translated well in my MBA program, where we did a lot of group work. I thought, “Hey, after 10 years in the Army I have skills that have really paid off for us as a group in this program.”
You can really see what military officers bring to the table—the ability to deal with people, manage different personalities, and bring people together to work as a team.
How was your experience with the GMAT exam?
I wasn’t that familiar with the GMAT before I took it. When I got chosen for this graduate school program, I was in Iraq and had a very limited window of time. All the schools I applied to required the GMAT, and I only had about a month and a half to prepare prior to taking the exam.
What advice do you have for others who might have to prepare for the exam on a tight schedule?
If I could do it over, I would focus primarily on getting ready for the math portion of the GMAT. Both math and writing are perishable skills, but in my 10 years in the Army prior to taking the GMAT, I did a lot of writing but didn’t exercise my math skills at all. I weighted my time equally between the two in preparation, and I shouldn’t have. I ended up performing poorly on the math.
A lot of what I was dumbfounded by on the test was stuff I easily could have tackled as an undergrad. Because I remembered always being good at math, I tried to complete each problem perfectly and got frustrated, and that ate up time. I shouldn’t have gotten hung up on one problem or another and should have just moved on instead.
How do you expect your combination of military experience and MBA training will help when you’re ready for a civilian career?
Probably one of the reasons I didn’t get out of the military earlier, even though I was eligible to, was that I didn’t know how to translate the experience into the civilian workforce. Being in the MBA program opened my eyes. Now I think, “Hey, I really do have a skill set that I could apply in a private organization.”
I’ve got about eight years left until retirement from the military. My experiences in the MBA program really give me a lot of insight into how to take the management and leadership skills I learned in the Army and translate those into the private sector, maybe as a manager of a non-military or non-government organization.
