MBA Voices: From Hard Hats To Case Studies: My Pivot From The Field To B-School

Sydney Harrison on the jobsite

Six years into my career in heavy civil construction, my days rarely looked the same. I might have started the morning by walking the jobsite in my hard hat and steel-toed boots, checking progress with foremen, or troubleshooting an issue with a crew. By midday, I could be coordinating with subcontractors, reviewing schedules, working through a problem with an inspector, or figuring out how to recover time after something didn’t go according to plan.

There were real consequences to the decisions I made. Crews were waiting. Equipment was moving. Concrete was being poured. A rainstorm could be on the way. Schedules and budgets did not pause while I collected more information or waited until I felt completely certain about a decision. Over time, I had grown comfortable being uncomfortable—and making decisions in high-stress situations.

Then I decided to leave it all and go back to school.

Rice Business Students at Partio

A FEAR OF STARTING OVER

I wasn’t leaving construction because I disliked it or had hit a dead end. That’s what made leaving so hard. I had built credibility in a male-dominated industry where experience matters. I had earned the kind of respect that takes years of showing up, making decisions, and delivering in the field. But as my responsibilities grew, the questions that interested me started getting bigger than the jobsite. I still cared about how we executed the project in front of us, but I became increasingly curious about the decisions happening above it. Why did companies pursue certain opportunities? How could two organizations facing similar challenges produce such different results?

I knew how to execute the work. I wanted to understand more about how businesses decided what work was worth doing in the first place. An MBA offered a chance to widen that lens. It would expose me to how leaders think about investment, growth, risk, and strategy beyond the day-to-day realities of a project.

But was I actually smart enough to do it?

It was a strange question for me to be asking myself. I have an engineering degree. I made it through Calculus III and differential equations. I spent six years applying technical knowledge to problems that were messy, complex, and very real. I led people in an industry that does not leave much room for indecision or mistakes. But I had never taken a finance or accounting class. I had never spent a day in corporate America. When I imagined walking into an MBA classroom, I pictured being surrounded by former consultants, bankers, accountants, entrepreneurs, and people who seemed to already speak the language of business. To me, that was intimidating.

Rice Business

EMBRACING BEING A LEARNER

For the first time in years, I was choosing to leave an environment as unpredictable and volatile as it could be. I would be moving from one where I knew I was capable and enter one where I wasn’t so sure of myself. Why leave something I was so good at? That may have been the hardest part of the decision. I wasn’t just changing careers. I was willingly giving up the comfort and confidence that came with being an expert in my field. In the process, I would be putting myself back in a position where I would have to be a beginner again. And being a beginner again is humbling.

In my first finance and accounting classes at the Rice MBA, there were moments when classmates would casually use terms I had never heard before. I would hear terms like unlevered beta and deferred tax liabilities and wonder whether I was already behind. Ironically, the math was rarely the intimidating part. Engineering had taught me how to work through difficult quantitative problems. The challenge was learning an entirely new language and understanding the story behind the numbers.

But somewhere along the way, I realized I had been measuring myself against the wrong standard. I did not need to walk into business school already knowing everything there is to know about business. That was why I was there in the first place.

I also began to recognize how much of my construction experience had followed me into the classroom. Case studies may look very different from a jobsite, but they often present a familiar challenge: how do you make the best decision with imperfect information, and how do you support and defend that decision?

DIFFERENT EXPERIENCES, DIFFERENT STRENGTHS

Sydney Harrison

I wasn’t in corporate America, but construction had taught me how to make decisions with imperfect information, communicate with people who had competing priorities, and keep moving forward when the plan ran into unforeseen obstacles. It had also taught me that the technically “correct” answer is not always the best solution if you cannot get the right people aligned around it. A plan only matters if people can effectively execute it.

At the same time, business school has forced me to grow in ways the field never did. In construction, the chain of command was often clear. MBA teams are different. Put five people with different backgrounds and strong opinions together on a project with no obvious hierarchy. Suddenly, leadership becomes less about having the answer and more about listening, influencing, and knowing when someone else in the room has the better solution.

Perhaps the biggest lesson from the transition has been learning that being inexperienced is not the same as being incapable. My entire cohort entered the classroom with different areas of expertise and something to learn from one another. In almost every class, discussions were shaped by the experiences people brought with them. Sometimes those differences were cultural; other times they came from the industries, roles, or situations classmates had encountered before Rice. In leadership classes, for example, not everyone had managed a team before, while I had spent years leading crews in the field. I could contribute what I had learned about motivating people, handling conflict, and earning trust. Ironically, classmates with entirely different experiences often approached those same challenges in ways I had never considered. The person who was the beginner in one discussion could easily be the expert in the next.

Before starting my MBA, I worried that pivoting meant leaving six years of experience behind because it wouldn’t translate well in this new environment. Instead, I realized how much of it has stuck with me throughout my MBA experience. Construction shaped how I lead, solve problems, manage uncertainty, and think about execution. Business school is teaching me how to apply those skills to a broader set of questions.

The hard hat may be gone, but the lessons that came with it are not. There are still plenty of moments when I encounter something unfamiliar, but I no longer see unfamiliarity as evidence that I am incapable of learning it. A career pivot isn’t starting over. It’s taking everything you’ve already built and learning what else you can build with it.

Sydney Harrison, Forté Fellow, is a second-year MBA candidate at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business, graduating in May 2027. Before Rice, she spent six years at Zachry Construction, where she managed complex infrastructure projects and field teams across Texas. She holds a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Texas A&M University, with a concentration in Construction Management and minor in Sustainable Architecture and Planning. She just completed a summer internship on the Strategic Planning team at CenterPoint Energy. At Rice, Sydney serves as Vice President of the Rice Business Student Association, Marketing Chair for the Rice Business Energy Case Competition, Co-President of the Rice Business Cork & Cask Club, Senior Lead Fellow for Strategic Business Communications I, and Rice Business Recruiting and Admissions Ambassador. Outside of school, she enjoys reading a good thriller or sci-fi novel, attending yoga or Pilates classes, and exploring Houston’s food scene.

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