Northwestern University: Mauro Mujica-Parodi III

Mauro served in the Marine Corps from 2004 to 2008 as an infantry officer. During that time, he did two tours in Al Ramadi, Iraq, as platoon commander and team commander.

Mauro joined the military after receiving his bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University, where he majored in political economics and minored in philosophy. Now he attends Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and is co-president of the Kellogg Veterans Association. In 2010 he interned as a summer associate with McKinsey & Co. Business school appealed to Mauro because he felt it would be the best and fastest way to return to the level of responsibility and leadership in civilian life that he’d achieved in the Marines.

How did your expectations match the reality of graduate business school?

I don’t think I was quite prepared for the fire hose that was business school. I say that in the best sense possible—you get here and there are just so many opportunities to pursue, including some outside the areas you might think you would find interesting.

For instance, I was in a Bollywood dance production put on by the school’s Indian Business Club. You know, when I was standing in Ramadi as a Marine, I wouldn’t have pictured myself doing that, but I’m certainly happy I did. That’s an example of the benefits of business school: You have opportunities you wouldn’t be able to experience anywhere else, and you make personal connections, including ones that take you outside your traditional network.

Another benefit is that business school is a good opportunity to get a bit introspective and find out what you’re really looking for in your career. You’re allowed time to pull back a little bit and think.

What do you wish you’d known before you applied?

This may sound contrary to what I just said, but it would have been better if I’d had time to drill down a bit about what I did and didn’t want to do for the next five or 10 years. It matters because the corporate recruiting happens so quickly, starting about a month after you arrive at school. The suddenness is even worse for people coming straight from the military, since a lot of times the military is all we know and we haven’t had an opportunity to investigate the private sector. Without some direction, it can be challenging.

What was your experience with the GMAT exam? Did it matter to you if schools required it? How did you prepare?

I was applying to only the best programs. I didn’t think it was worth it to pursue an MBA and lose two years of income unless I was going to get a big benefit from the program, not only in pay but also in responsibility and leadership. So for me, it seemed like all the best schools require the GMAT. The GMAT is the qualifier, the staple.

I was pretty diligent and studied for two or three months. I actually enjoyed it. Prior to the military, I worked hard in college, but I put more effort into the GMAT and then into business school. And so I was, one, excited to see that I did well and, two, found the test to be a better gauge of my reasoning ability than some are. I also appreciated the computer-adaptive nature of the test—it was more interactive.

Did you find that the skills, values, and experiences you had in the military helped you make the transition into the school environment, with its academic rigors?

This was something I was a little concerned about. A military veteran is not going to be bringing specific business acumen. That said, we bring something that very few other people have, and that is a deep immersion in leadership. Military veterans are just—frankly—unmatched in experiences that no one else has—experiences we had while getting shot at. That’s a baptism by fire. Whether as a submariner or a tanker or a pilot, military men and women possess the ability to lead under stress, which is something I don’t think other people have experienced in the same manner.

But is it hard for veterans to deal with the pressures of school?

The honest truth is that you’re going to have to work harder in the first three months of school than many other people. But everyone’s a career switcher here, wanting to grow and change careers via their MBA program. Everyone is learning something new. If someone learned finance in their previous line of work, now they have to learn operations and marketing. What is beneficial about business school is that when you bring all these people with diverse backgrounds together and do group work, you really can achieve some pretty incredible results because everyone brings something different and powerful to the table.

What have you learned about translating military leadership so that it makes sense to your peers in the classroom and beyond?

You need to make your stories relevant to the person you’re speaking to. When I first came out of the military and was applying for jobs, I probably told people I was a platoon commander who led 40 to 50 Marines in two combat tours in Ramadi, Iraq. And that sounded nice, but it had nothing to do with business.

So to change that up, I would now say, “I was a mid-level executive who led 40 people in an international setting where I had to deal with logistical complications, work on command-and-control issues, and market to the local international population.”

It’s a difference in semantics, but if you say, I’m a Marine, or a soldier, or a sailor, or an airman, I can guarantee you that 90 percent of the time, people don’t know exactly what you mean. I’m often surprised what a big black box the military is. You have to learn how to translate military jargon into business jargon.

So if you could give advice to peers in the military who are considering an MBA, what would you tell them?

I have three pieces of advice.

First, start early to get to know the schools and the tests. You’re pretty busy in the military and can’t study 20 hours a week. But even one or two hours a week is doable to wrap your head around the process of applying to business school, reaching out to schools and other prospective students, and practicing for the GMAT.

Second, know that every school is, more likely than not, going to have a veterans’ club, and you should reach out to that group. Those people were in your position two years ago, at most. They’re there to help.

Third, apply to the best school possible. A lot of times, either because of misinformation or because they just don’t know the total picture, military people think only about, for example, how much is this going to cost me, how many years am I going be out of the workforce, and so on.

But schools are looking for what military people can bring. With the post-9/11 GI Bill and programs like the Yellow Ribbon grants that Kellogg participates in, you have a tremendous opportunity to go to some of the best schools in the world. And you don’t lose anything by applying.