My Story: From Morgan Stanley to Afghanistan

His story: 

I started my career at what’s now Morgan Stanley. I was an economics major at Tulane University, but I took some business school classes and ended up getting an internship with Morgan Stanley in New Orleans. I really enjoyed the work, and it was something new for me, so I fell into the finance mindset: “I want to get a good job, I want to make good money”—I kind of went that route.

After graduation, I worked as an analyst for a portfolio manager at their San Francisco office. Later, I moved to Houston to work in the wealth management division. It’s a lot like running your own business: You’re commission-based, so the harder and more effectively you work, the more money you make.

Over 50% of my training class was gone within two years of starting. Not many people survive, I guess. If you’ve done well, you generally stay with it. That’s why it was kind of weird for me to think about leaving. But I realized that I was helping a lot of retirees plan for their retirement, and while each client had a unique situation, the crux of the problem was always the same.

I started thinking about what my choices were: Do I want to think about taking a different role in the company, or do I want to reevaluate and go from there? I took a step back and decided that business school would be my best option. It would give me a practical skill set, and it would allow me to explore other possibilities and sort out what I wanted to do.

I applied to a lot of the top tier-schools: Kellogg, Wharton, Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, Michigan, Tuck, and the University of Texas. Initially, though, I applied to just a couple of schools in the final rounds. It was already too late to apply to most schools, and I was throwing a net out there.  I literally took the GMAT without studying and just did it all within a couple of weeks.I hadn’t visited a single place. Eventually, I realized that if I wanted to make this big $160,000 investment, I had to make sure I picked a school I really wanted to attend, somewhere I’d checked out.

Before I visited Tuck, I talked to an alum who was driving up to Hanover to do interviews. I actually got goosebumps from talking to this guy, because he was just so passionate about Tuck. I was like, “There’s something different about this place.” I had talked to so many people, and I’d never gotten that experience before.

I don’t often just dip my toes in the water: I’m a jump-in-head-first kind of guy. When I went to visit Tuck, I realized that, like most MBA students, I’m going to live in a big city for the rest of my life. So I was excited about the idea of a two-year adventure in the middle of nowhere. After my interview, I was like, “That’s the place I’m going. If I don’t get in there, I’m going to be devastated. If I do get in there, it’s automatic.” I spent more time on my Tuck application than anything else. Luckily, it worked, and I got in.

One of the first things I did at Tuck was sign up for the Outward Bound trip where you sail on the coast of Maine. Imagine this: You’ve never met these people before in your entire life, and you’re going to spend five days with them on a thirteen-foot sailboat with no power and no running water. That was my first impression of Tuck. Some of the people on the trip had never even been to the U.S. before, so the trip was their first experience in America. That adventurous spirit and that excitement about what they were jumping into for the next few years blew me away.

I became close with a couple of buddies I met on the sailboat, along with a few I met while living in the dorms during my first year. We became pretty good friends, and we realized that we wanted to live in The Coup, a house that has always been passed down to six guys. It was the cool house… at least, I thought it was the cool house. I don’t know what everybody else thought. The garage is dedicated as the pong stadium, and it has two Dartmouth pong tables with the school logo painted on. I was the commissioner of what I’ll call a sports league—the Spring Harbor League (SHL)—and during SHL finals, I was able to give a speech that kicked off a night of pure craziness. We even got SHL t-shirts made. People just loved it.

You can’t be a wallflower at Tuck. You can’t walk around and type on your iPhone or whatever. First of all, the cell phone service is bad, and second, you know all your classmates because it’s a small school, and so everyone kind of expects everyone else to say hi. Being at Tuck is about being that total team player, that person who is looking to engage with other people.