Meet The McCombs’ MBA Class of 2018

Landon Hairgrove

The University of Texas at Austin, McCombs School of Business

Hometown:  Colleyville, Texas

Pre-MBA Location: Washington, DC

Fun Fact About Yourself: I am a charter member of​ a men’s book club, called the Gentlemen’s Appreciation for Literature Society (“GALS” for short).

Undergraduate School and Major: Yale College, Political Science Major

Employers and Job Titles Since Graduation: 

• S. Senator John Cornyn (Washington, D.C.)
  • Legislative Assistant – Transportation and Homeland Security
• S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (Washington, D.C.)
  • Legislative Correspondent & Legislative Aide

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far: I am very proud of a number of initiatives I helped dedicated elected officials usher into law, in spite of an often divisive legislative process. They included innovative partnerships to reduce border wait times and modernizing international bridges; regulatory relief for strategic transportation corridors; seed capital for new judiciary capital assets across the country; and bringing the Interstate system to one of the largest unserved population centers in the U.S. However, I take the greatest pride in the many hours spent just listening, trying to understand the needs of real people, businesses, and communities, and hopefully doing my part to make the weird world of Washington, D.C. a little more open and responsive to the many challenges they face.

What advice do you have for applicants in actually applying to a school, writing essays, doing admission interviews, and getting recommenders to write letters on your behalf?

Applying: Manage your time. As you identify your target schools, determine the appropriate application round for you. Be honest with yourself about your upcoming workload and commitments outside the application process, and earmark specific times for working on applications and hitting specific milestones during dedicated hours or days. Pay close attention to deadlines, and decide early how to address application due dates that hit around the same time. Avoid a time crunch that will inevitably force you to sacrifice quality on any one application you plan to submit and leave time for review and reflection. Try to complete everything at least a week in advance of the deadline, so you can step away for twenty-four hours before reconnecting with your answers and essays. As you read through during that final cut, think critically about whether you’ve accurately and effectively portrayed what you have to offer to an audience that otherwise doesn’t know you yet.

Essays: Be creative, but within reason. Before you hit send, make sure you have the rhetorical chops to pull off a layered allegory or poetic free verse as a b-school essay! By this point in your life, you’ve likely already experienced both success and adversity. Reflect on those experiences, the degree to which they could translate into a great essay tailored to a given school based on what they value most in top candidates, and then tell your story thoughtfully and honestly.

Interviews: Before you reach the interview stage, research your options. Do you have a choice between interviewing with an alumnus, current student, or admissions officer? If so, think about each potential audience, and which one might improve your comfort level and openness to sharing in the interview setting. Consider the questions you’re likely to be asked and practice. If you get a curveball question for which you feel unprepared, take a moment to form a thoughtful answer, rather than just blurting something out that may not be well-organized. It may seem counterintuitive to hesitate, but if it yields a more cogent response, it will likely show that you were simply taking a strategic second to construct a better answer to his or her question.

Recommenders:  Choose advisors and mentors committed to you and your application process.  Make sure your recommenders not only know your professional capabilities better than most, but are also individuals whom you know to have an established reputation for responsiveness and attention to detail. A recommendation from a Fortune 500 CEO may sound like a huge value-add for your application, but consider how well that person can actually speak to your qualifications and experience. You should also do a realistic assessment of the amount of time and energy a given person, in light of his or her other obligations, is likely to put into your recommendation letter. You also may need these recommenders to support you on multiple applications, so make sure you keep them informed as to your progress so they have ample time to respond and overall feel part of your decision. Even if you go with a school other than the one to which they recommended you, these are folks who will be in your corner for the rest of your professional life. Treat them accordingly.

What led you to choose this program for your full-time MBA? Attending business school full-time is a major decision, one that should not, in my view, be made in isolation. My fiancée and I were fairly certain that we’d be uprooting from Washington, D.C. to a new home, and jointly worked through which programs offered a great education, top post-graduation employment opportunities, and an engaged alumni network spread across markets all over the world. We then applied our own non-scientific community criteria that we identified as priorities from the onset.

In general, would a particular program put us in a location where we could both grow personally and professionally, or would I just be dragging her somewhere that we’d just endure living for a couple years? On that front, Austin far exceeded our expectations. With each subsequent, McCombs-specific touch point throughout our process, Texas naturally emerged as the best fit for us thank to due diligence on its ranking and class size relative to other top programs; coffee chats with friendly and accomplished alumni; in-person discussions with admissions staff travelling the globe to connect with future MBAs; and visits to campus that demonstrated not only the high caliber peer set at UT Austin, but also the effort McCombs makes to welcome significant others to the family –

Tell us about your dream job or dream employer at this point in your life? I spent a lot of time working on transportation and infrastructures issues on Capitol Hill, where I came to adopt the view that access is fundamentally valuable to individuals and businesses alike. It’s also a daunting goal to achieve in practice. I’d like to join a team with a demonstrated capacity to execute innovative solutions to finance and sustain the public and private sector assets that we need now and for generations to come, where I can learn from industry leaders and help deliver meaningful results for clients and stakeholders.

What would you ultimately like to achieve before you graduate? After almost seven years in government, I am excited to learn more about the private sector! I hope to work with the McCombs community to understand how best to leverage my public sector and MBA experiences toward new professional opportunities, with a focus on the transportation and infrastructure challenges I worked on while on Capitol Hill. I want to be an active member of the Austin community, and do my part to support greater collaboration between the university and regional stakeholders on innovative solutions that balance social impact with developing a successful and sustainable business case for getting involved. I also look forward to building great relationships with my classmates, and hopefully establishing myself as a kind, respectful and responsible peer.

What would you like your business school peers to say about you after you graduate from this program? That I was someone whom they could trust not to drop the ball and deliver when it counts… and that they had a chance to meet my wife, who is way cooler than me.