How My MBA Helped Me Get Where I Am Today

Tony Rogers, BBA ’90, MBA ’97
Vice president of advertising for Wal-Mart

My MBA gave me the chance to reinvent myself, so in a sense it changed my life. I graduated from UT in 1990 with an accounting degree and went to work for one of the big accounting firms. At one point, I was auditing a golf course company and found myself being around the marketing group. I thought, “That’s a pretty cool job!”
 
It isn’t easy to switch from accounting to marketing without experience. So I returned to Austin with my wife in 1995, with the goal of earning an MBA and becoming a brand manager. A second-year MBA student, Lou Mabley, who became a mentor to me, steered me toward one of the top marketing professors in the country, Leigh McAlister. He said, “If you want to go into brand marketing, that’s the person you need to find.”
 
Professor McAlister was an amazing supporter, and I became her teaching assistant and practically her shadow. She also arranged practicums where a group of us worked on real world assignments for manufacturing and retail businesses.
 
By the time I graduated—after completing an internship, the projects with Professor McAlister and my coursework—I was interviewing for jobs with a pretty decent marketing resume.
 
I went on to work in brand management for some great companies. Since leaving Austin, we have had the chance to live in a lot of wonderful places, like Minneapolis, Dallas and San Diego.
 
Now I am in Bentonville, Ark., and I’m often asked what it is like to live here. I tell people it’s like someone took a suburb of a major city and put it in the middle of the Ozarks. We really like it. It definitely has been great for my family. Of course, Arkansas is not the easiest place to be a Longhorn fan, so we have to band together up here. Fortunately, we now have an Arkansas MBA alumni chapter.
 
Working at Wal-Mart has been great, too. I oversee a small team that manages our company’s advertising. We work with folks inside Wal-Mart and with creative agencies around the country to produce campaigns that build our brand across the different media types and in eight different languages. It’s easily the most challenging and the most interesting time in my career.
 
Looking back, McCombs was the perfect choice for me. I learned from dedicated professors and a world-class group of classmates, many of whom have become lifelong friends. And I got exposure to a whole host of leading companies and recruiters. Now it has come full circle, and I’m helping to recruit smart and motivated UT students to come work at Wal-Mart. I’ll be the first to let them know that it is possible to transform your life while earning your MBA at McCombs.