Alexander Emmert, Wharton Class of 2020, atop Mount Kilimanjaro. Courtesy photo
Alec Emmert has been around danger practically his whole life. He grew up in Colombia, Belgium, and Brazil, where his father was a foreign service diplomat; the family had to flee Colombia when a cartel put a bounty on their heads. He attended the Naval Academy and became an officer on a nuclear submarine, deploying four times to the Middle East; in 2011, he was a watch officer in Bahrain when the Arab Spring erupted, and amid the chaos and daily escalating street violence he was tasked with ensuring the safety of American and foreign personnel.
After all that and more — much more — a little thing like business school wasn’t about to intimidate Emmert. He’ll start his MBA journey in the fall after having been admitted to the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania as a member of its Class of 2020.
“Most officers consider business school immediately after leaving the military,” says Emmert, a native of Washington, D.C. who currently serves as a management consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. “I took a different path in that I chose to work in the private sector for several years before attending business school. About two years ago, I decided that I wanted to pursue an MBA, and have spent the time since trying to get into my first-choice school, Wharton. My acceptance is a dream come true.”
READY TO ‘LEVERAGE MY EXPERIENCES IN AN ACADEMIC SETTING’
Alec Emmert. Courtesy photo
At 35, Emmert expects to be among the oldest members of his Wharton class, if not the oldest — a full eight years older than the average age in Wharton’s last several cohorts. But what an eight years it has been. He’s gone from a military career that took him not only to the Mideast but also to Italy, Ukraine, and dozens of other countries (he’s been to 45 “and counting”), on to an internship at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, where he and about 20 others were given backstage roles in a veterans immersion program, then back to the Navy on a recall from the Reserves, where he mobilized to the Middle East in 2014-2015 and planned maritime support for special operations missions. There, in his second stint in the Armed Forces, he assisted in the evacuation of the U.S. Embassy in Sana’a, Yemen.
Leaving the Navy again, Emmert moved on to a lucrative (and adventuresome) consulting gig that has taken him to Saudi Arabia, where he is currently assisting clients with organizational transformation. Meanwhile, he somehow found time to learn basic Arabic (in just six months!), climb Mount Kilimanjaro, and earn a Master of Finance degree from Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. For the last two years he has been planning his application to an elite MBA program, studying for the GMAT (he “had a very good day” and scored well enough to “be in the conversation at the top schools”) and revising (“and revising and revising”) his resume and B-school application — all while developing a long-term plan that involves impact investment in developing nations.
“My experiences overseas have shown me that economic development is key to security and national stability,” Emmert tells Poets&Quants. “After my experiences in the military and private sector, I am ready to take a step back and leverage them in an academic setting. Having traveled the world both in the military and as a private citizen, I have seen the direct link between poverty, crime, and terrorism.
“After researching business schools, I saw Wharton as the perfect fit for me due to its active Social Impact Initiative. I plan on using my time there to study ways to use private enterprise to drive social change and economic development.”
BUSINESS AS THE ENGINE FOR POSITIVE CHANGE
Emmert has seen the crushing effects of poverty in many countries, beginning with the favelas of Brazil, where he spent part of his childhood while his father served in the foreign service. When Emmert was stationed at Naval Forces Central Command Headquarters in Manama, Bahrain, he saw firsthand how poverty sparked the protests of the Arab Spring, an uprising that gave hope to millions before ending in violence, government crackdowns, and for most, a return to the status quo.
Witnessing the response to repression and a return to disenfranchisement for the majority, Emmert began to mull other possibilities for change. He decided that business — investment and support for entrepreneurship, education, and the development of commercial infrastructure — could make a more lasting positive impact. That’s where he sees himself post-MBA.
“Many of the big banks have sustainable investment funds, where they look at opportunities to generate long-term competitive financial returns and positive societal impact,” he says. “These funds measure ROI more by social impact rather than financial returns. I plan on exploring these opportunities while I am pursuing my MBA, especially through Wharton’s Impact Investing Partners. I have some insight into the challenges developing nations are facing, and I’d be interested in learning about the projects and businesses that are being launched to combat them.
“The next step would be to launch a socially conscious startup, which is something I’d like to do at some point in my life. I have seen a few inspirational examples recently. I watched a report on a new company that utilizes drones to deliver blood and medical supplies to remote areas in Africa. The drones cut delivery time from several days to a couple of hours, thus saving lives. I also see Jake Harriman, a fellow veteran and Naval Academy alum, as a role model. He founded a company called Nuru International that is currently working to eradicate extreme poverty by teaching sustainability to impoverished communities.”
(See the following page for Poets&Quants‘ interview with Alec Emmert. It has been edited for length and readability.)
Alec Emmert has visited 45 countries — and counting. Courtesy photo
You were in Bahrain when it became one of the first countries to experience the Arab Spring in 2011. Talk about what it was like to be there on the ground.
At the time, I was a watch officer in the Navy, which meant that I supervised or oversaw all the ships operating within the Middle East — aircraft missions that were going on, and also any issues that were going on on-shore. We started getting reports about demonstrations in Egypt, nothing to be alarmed about, just a bit of civil unrest. Then out of nowhere these news reports started coming in that Tahrir Square (in Cairo) was over-run by demonstrators, and the next thing you know Hosni Mubarak, who had been the president for over 30 years, was deposed. And then in Bahrain they had this thing called the Day of Rage, and they started having demonstrations that basically escalated into full-on street violence. The Saudi military ended up coming over the causeway to quell them.
It happened so fast, and we had to stand up a crisis response cell, and I was a part of that. We just wanted to make sure that all U.S. personnel were at all times accounted for, that their neighborhoods were safe, that there was no risk of loss of life to them.
You had a varied and impressive career in the Navy. Why did you leave to join the private sector?
A lot of times, as a military officer’s career progresses, you reach an inflection point at the seven- to eight-year point. For Naval Academy graduates it’s around the five-year point when your obligated service is up and the eight-year point where you have to sign on for more time, and you have to make a decision whether you want to make it a career or you want to have done you time and have served your country and move on and find other options. For me, at the time, I had done so much in the Navy — I had served on a ship as a nuclear officer, I had deployed to the Middle East a couple times, I had served over there, I had done international exercises in Ukraine — and I was just really happy with what I had accomplished and I wanted to move on to another challenge. I wanted to get into the private sector.
I wanted to have some more say over my destiny, because in the Navy you can put in your preferences — you can say I want to go to this coast or that coast, this port or that port — but at the end of the day you go where Uncle Sam tells you to go. And for me I just wanted to have that autonomy over my own life and make my own decisions, if I wanted to change careers, if I wanted to move to a different city, to be able to have that.
All the same, you got called back into the Navy at one point. What happened there?
I got called back as a reservist. That was actually a very exciting opportunity and something I don’t regret at all. I was called back to work as a maritime planner for a Special Operations task force and that showed me a whole new side of the military work. I had previously done maritime operations as a submarine officer, which is the conventional route — conventional deployments and things like that. Whereas this was how to deploy these naval ships and aircraft in an unconventional role, which was supporting Special Operations forces in the Middle East. For me, that was really cool, because I got to see how that operated in such a dynamic environment. To oversee those operations was just a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
You’ve certainly made the most of your brief time in the private sector. What was it like to work at The Daily Show?
Alec Emmert as a submarine officer. Courtesy photo
That was an incredible experience for me. When I got out of the Navy I just wanted to do the most un-military thing I could possibly do. And that was living in New York City and working on The Daily Show. It was a fantastic opportunity that got offered to me through the Veterans Immersion Program run by American Corporate Partners. To his credit, Jon Stewart pushed this — he said, “I want to get a group of veterans who are interested in television news to come to New York ands how we do things on The Daily Show.” And he wanted to get our perspectives from our military service and to see what we thought about current events and current issues, so it was kind of a two-way street. There were about 20 of us, and we learned about all facets of television news production, and we go to meet with Jon Stewart regularly, John Oliver regularly. This was in 2013 before Trevor Noah took over. It was just a really, really cool experience.
It was funny, coming directly from the military where everything was very formal and I had to swipe my badge five different times to get into my office, working at The Daily Show I got to grow out a beard and show up to work in a hoodie and jeans, they had dogs running around everywhere because they had a bring-your-dog-to-work type of thing — it was just 180 degrees from what I was used to, and it was such a cool experience that I’m really glad I did.
Then you got called back to do another stint in the Navy. Was it during this second go-round that you began to think about business school, and specifically an MBA, as part of your future, or was that later when you began work as a consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton in Saudi Arabia?
It began in the Navy but it really began to take hold in Saudi Arabia because for me — and this is why I really want to tell my story, not just for veterans but for other people considering getting an MBA — I’m 35 years old, and the average age for admission at Wharton is 27. I think I’ll probably be one of the oldest guys in my class. But I’m living proof that you’re ever too old to get in.
There’s this lockstep mentality in the military: I’m going to do my tour, I’m going to get out in my late 20s, go to business school, and then get a job. But for me, I got that whole private sector experience already, and I feel like I’ve been fairly successful in my job. I’ve been working here in Saudi Arabia doing fairly high-level work, and about a year ago I started doing a little soul-searching: I said, “What do I really want from life? I can stick here in the consulting firm, I can make partner, but what do I really want out of life?” And I thought about my experiences in the military and my experiences growing up in Brazil, where I saw poor kids every day, kids on the street. And the experiences I had in Bahrain and Yemen and also East Africa with the piracy situation they had there, and I just said, “I want to do something to fix this.” As a military officer you’re kind of in reactionary mode — you deal with the pirates, you deal with the terrorists. But you don’t necessarily attack the root cause. And to me, that root cause is poverty.
If you look across the board, everything from crime to terrorism, poverty is the driving factor behind both. That’s what I want to use the rest of my life to fight — global poverty.
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