Mark O’Connell

University of Michigan, Ross School of Business

“If you put an engineering dweeb, a Marine Corps officer, and a ski bum in a blender, I would be the product.”

Hometown: Park City, UT (but I have many!)

Fun fact about yourself: I’ve moved 15 times in my life – twice internationally to France and Mongolia!

Undergraduate School and Degree: University of Southern California – Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering, with an emphasis in Petroleum Engineering.

Where was the last place you worked before enrolling in business school? My last role before leaving the military was as a school principal and curriculum developer for the US Marine Corps’ advanced combat training schools.

Where did you intern during the summer of 2024? I interned with Deloitte as a Summer Associate in the Chicago office, working to develop a go-to-market strategy for an AI tool for natural gas emergency forecasting that Deloitte had developed internally and was looking to offer to a wider range of utility clients. While I certainly learned A LOT about the nitty gritty of how AI works, the vast majority of my learning happened in the form of personal development – the value of endless curiosity, initiative, decisiveness in uncertain situations, and an “I can make it happen” attitude.

Where will you be working after graduation? I’m happy to say I’ll be returning to Deloitte Chicago as a Senior Consultant! The summer was a blast, and I’m ready to return to the working world. My personal passions are sports, energy, and AI, which align well with Deloitte’s specialties, so I’m excited to see where those passions lead me in the future and how they might intersect.

Community Work and Leadership Roles in Business School:

• Executive Vice President of the MBA Student Council
• Academics Chair for Section 1
• VP of Current Student Engagement for the Armed Forces Association: Speaker at VETx 2023 and lead planner of VETx 2024, Ross’s TED-talk style event that relates veteran experiences to the broader Ross community.
• Co-Director of the Consulting Recruiting Prep Program for the Armed Forces Association
• Executive Producer of Business Beyond Usual, Ross’s student-led podcast series

Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? Serving as a lead planner for VETx 2024, alongside Chris Brymer and Gus Sawicki, is far-and-away my greatest accomplishment as an MBA. I was a speaker at VETx 2023, which was a rewarding experience, but serving as a lead planner for VETx 2024 was completely different and far more meaningful. As a speaker, you’re deeply focused on yourself and ensuring your speech is delivered well, resonates deeply, and provides thought-provoking content for your listeners. As a planner, the dynamic changes, and you become far more concerned with facilitating an incredible experience for the audience and ensuring that the speakers you’re coaching deliver an extraordinary speech.

What made me proud of VETx 2024 was seeing the product of what we had worked so hard to create – a platform for veterans to share their most challenging and difficult stories in a safe environment that brought the crowd to their feet. All the while, you’re explaining the “veteran” answer to complex questions like, What is perseverance; How do you systematically respond to chaos; How do you personally and professionally respond to devastating traumas; and How do you find yourself when you’ve lost your identity?” Ultimately, VETx 2024 was my finest accomplishment because I was able to serve my community again as a former member of the US military.

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? This achievement stems from my last job before business school as the school principal for the Marine Corps’ combat training schools. I had the great fortune of landing in this role at the same time that the Marine Corps was beginning a generational shift in how it approached training and education. Part of this shift required that I completely re-write the training curriculum with a small team of other combat instructors for the first time in over 50 years. It was an extraordinary opportunity, if only because, by pure happenstance, I fell into a position where I had all the capabilities of the US government at my back but none of the restrictions.

I have a clear and visceral memory of the very last training event from when we piloted this new course. While the entire program was 15 weeks long, the last week of the course was a grueling experience that required Marines to hike and fight for 96 hours across 130km of rugged terrain with very little sleep or food. After this 96-hour period, students were made to believe they would get a good night’s rest, only to be woken up at 2 a.m. with simulated gunfire, artillery fire, and smoke grenades to add to the confusion, after which they had to hike another 15km. What made me proud was the Marines’ faces at the end of this hike – each of their faces had a look of determination on it that said, “It doesn’t matter what the world does to me anymore. It can’t possibly break me. I’ve come this far, and I simply will not quit.” Those faces are seared into my mind because I realized at that moment that the curriculum re-write I had completed was going to personally impact tens of thousands of Marines for years to come.

Why did you choose this business school? I could stack reasons from here to the moon, but if I had to pick one, it’s the “pay it forward” mindset that is endemic to Ross. As an applicant, I had calls with many students from different MBA programs. Still, the people at Ross stood out for their unusual sense of community, their willingness to go out of their way to help me make the best choice for me, and their consistent refrain of “we pay it forward.” This “pay it forward” line struck me because it felt like something that I had experienced in the military – “I don’t do it for me, I do it for those that will come after me” – and this mindset of service to others made me feel that I belonged at Ross more than anywhere else.

What was your favorite course as an MBA? Finance 615 – Valuations. Valuing a company, or parts of a company, during an acquisition or divestiture is extremely complicated. However, I felt that Valuations was able to break it down into much more manageable concepts – how much money is each part of the company expected to make, and how much risk is associated with that expectation?

As I am not an investment banker, I assume this dichotomy of cash flows and risk was somewhat simplified in comparison to real models, but this class helped me understand how “future cash flows” were actually estimated; what a high or low discount rate implied in terms of business risk; and how those two core components interacted to determine business value.

What was your favorite MBA event or tradition at your business school? The Bus. It has to be The Bus. Every business school in the country has several unique experiences and traditions. Still, you would be hard-pressed to find a tradition where 1,000+ MBA students are welcome, regardless of their scholastic standing or social connections, and can instantly find a friend to sing Mr. Brightside with before a Michigan football game. We would like to say Michigan is the #1 MBA program in the country since no other MBA program has a recent national football championship to its name (aside from that school down south), and The Bus really solidifies its reputation.

I’m aggressively focused on the football aspect. Still, I was also the host for a recent Business Beyond Usual episode where Grant Potts, Macey Guthery, and Tyler Ringler (presidents of The Bus and the Michigan Business Students’ Association) perfectly described what The Bus means to Ross: Every school has their unique traditions, but no other school has a tradition like Ross, where the tradition is run by students, for students, at scale, with no rules on who is invited to the party or who you will meet.

Looking back over your MBA experience, what is the one thing you’d do differently and why? I wish I had taken more sports business classes while I was here. Ross offers an opportunity for their MBAs to take classes in graduate programs that have no affiliation with Ross, and one of the opportunities available to MBA students is to take classes in the Masters of Sports Management program. Unfortunately, my class schedule at Ross overlapped with the classes in this degree program and prevented me from taking any of these courses. Given my interest in the business of sports, I wish I had taken a few. Some that come to mind are financial management for the sports industry, strategic management in sports, and sports real estate.

What did you love most about your business school’s town? I absolutely love Ann Arbor’s pace of life and small-town feel. I’ve lived in big cities for pretty much my entire life and will be headed to Chicago when I graduate. This is perhaps the only opportunity I’ve ever had to experience life in a small town, and it’s been hugely beneficial to take a breather from the hustle of big cities. Having the ability to slow my life down a bit to focus on personal development has really had outsized impacts on how much I’ve been able to learn at Ross. Not having the distractions of a big city has really allowed me to make the town and the people in the MBA program my family.

What movie or television show (e.g. The Big Short, The Founder, Mad Men, House of Lies) best reflects the realities of business and what did you learn from it? I thought Air was a great representation of the realities of business. It did a great job of portraying risky corporate decisions at Nike in signing an unproven rookie; brand strategy when they built a shoe around Michael Jordan’s persona and not the other way around; negotiation strategy when they showed Deloris Jordan’s case for a revenue sharing deal; and business strategy innovation when Nike agreed to the deal.

The movie does a great job of delivering these business lessons, but if I had to pick one, I think the lessons in branding were the most powerful, particularly the idea that developing a strong brand requires a creation story and a “why us?” that resonates with consumers more deeply than just “we are the best shoe for the best athlete.”

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? Ross has really doubled down on integrating AI into the curriculum by asking students to identify both positive and negative aspects of using AI. In our core strategy class, the first class I took at Ross, every assignment asked us to put a prompt into ChatGPT, then critique the response and identify aspects that AI got right. Although my exposure to AI was limited in this situation, it did help develop a sense of healthy skepticism about the answers that AI provided.

This type of exposure has ultimately returned massive dividends, as it has had dramatic positive impacts on every aspect of my professional life, from leveraging AI to help me write code during my Big Data class to enhancing my prompt engineering during my internship.

Which MBA classmate do you most admire? This is the hardest question because I admire many Ross classmates. With that said, if I had to choose one, I would pick Mike Johnson. Mike is also a veteran who was able to secure an internship and full-time job with McKinsey while simultaneously balancing the duties of being a contributing team member on academic assignments, an active teammate with the rugby club, and a good husband and father to his wife and two children.

What inspires me most is his ability to successfully balance his family, schoolwork, personal life, and job. Many students have struggled with the pressure of trying to keep the four-legged stool of their professional, personal, social, and academic lives balanced. Mike has done an extraordinary job of balancing the four and ensuring that all have been properly respected and prioritized.

What are the top two items on your professional bucket list? My biggest professional dream is to work on the Salt Lake City 2034 Olympics. I’m from Park City (where some Olympic skiing events are almost guaranteed to take place), and the current residential and transit options are already hugely problematic for visiting our small ski town – so infrastructure design and financing are top of mind. Anything associated with the Salt Lake City Olympics and developing the local community is a major interest.

My other professional dream is to work on the avalanche control team for Ski Patrol in Park City. This one is more niche and probably something of a retirement dream, but I’ve always thought that hiking up untouched snow on a powder day, setting off explosives, and skiing down afterward to make sure the run is safe for others is the coolest job in the world. At the same time, I like to tell myself that I’m perfectly suited for the job between my military background and my passion for skiing.

What made Mark such an invaluable addition to the Class of 2025?

“If there were a blueprint for the ideal MBA student, Mark O’Connell would be the prototype. He has it all—sharp analytical skills, natural leadership, and a generosity of spirit that makes it impossible not to admire him. As his professor in a corporate financial reporting class, I saw Mark thrive in debates over complex financial topics. Whether serving as Executive VP of the MBA Student Council, organizing VETx to highlight veteran experiences, or leading the charge in the Consulting Recruiting Prep Program, Mark has left an undeniable impact on the Ross community. His passion for bringing people together is evident not just in his leadership roles but also in his work as an Executive Producer of Business Beyond Usual, where he masterfully blends storytelling, humor, and insight to showcase what makes Ross so special. Mark’s presence at Ross has been extraordinary, and there’s no doubt his impact will continue long after graduation.”

Ryan T Ball
Clinical Assistant Professor of Accounting

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