Learning, Doing, Leading

Ed.M. candidate Brian Mitchell never planned on a career in higher education. After all, the business executive had 19 years working as a successful marketer for the pharmaceutical industry. But when the dean of his alma mater, Emory University, asked if he’d ever consider working in higher education, he couldn’t say no. He had always been grateful to Emory, and now he could give back — every day.

“I give so much credit [to Emory] for my trajectory,” says Mitchell, a Chicago native who credits his education at Emory, as well as his undergraduate studies at Morehouse College, with his marketing career’s success. Mitchell sometimes reflected on this success during business meetings, where he was often the only person of color at the table — wondering why he seemed to be the exception. “It became clear after business school that I was sitting in a room that I never would have been in without my education,” Mitchell says.

As an alumnus, Mitchell was very involved in his alma maters, particularly Emory, where he was honored with an alumni award. When accepting, he gave a speech in which he encouraged students to always be “learning, doing, and leading.” This caught the attention of the dean of Emory’s Goizueta Business School, who asked Mitchell to work there.

Despite his dedication to his own education, Mitchell had never considered making a career for himself in the field. Although making such a big change was risky, he jumped right in. Now, five years into his second, “stumbled-upon” career as associate dean of MBA programs, he admits that the transition wasn’t always smooth.

“When you switch careers, there is this tendency to take what worked before and apply what you learned. That was a terrible mistake [in my experience] in higher education,” Mitchell says. “I was a fish out of water.”

His business-trained mind was hard to shake the first year on the job at Emory, he says, but he quickly realized the work was really about people, particularly helping students achieve transformation in school and, ultimately, their lives.

Although Mitchell knew he had a lot to learn about the field, and had planned from the start of his new career to study higher education, it took him several years before making the leap. He visited HGSE open houses and recruitment gatherings for at least four years before applying. It became apparent to him early on that the melding of practice, policy, and research and the focus on senior level leadership at HGSE appealed to him. “Other schools weren’t talking about the same things,” he says.

Though he is 20 years older than most of his colleagues in the Higher Education Program (HEP), Mitchell jumped whole-heartedly into his year at HGSE. He arrived eager to learn all the fundamentals of higher education so that he wouldn’t remain “tone deaf” to what his students need.

Mitchell says he’s not the same person after taking Professor Richard Light’s class, Tackling the Toughest Challenges in Modern American Higher Education. "Light’s course really emphasized many of the important issues affecting the sector now and that will have implications in the future,” he says.

In fact, many of the courses Mitchell’s taken in have gone beyond his expectations in providing not only a deep understanding of higher education, but also a history of the field, including Professor Julie Reuben’s The History of Higher Education and Professor Bridget Terry Long’s The Economics of Higher Education.  

“The different courses span the entire spectrum of higher education in America,” he says, also noting the exposure provided by HEP to all aspects of higher education — including the opportunity to meet with high-level college and university presidents — continues to amaze Mitchell.

Mitchell’s time at HGSE has already impacted his perspective at Emory, where he continues working full-time as the associate dean during his studies.

“The stakes are so high for people attending higher education all across the spectrum,” he says. “I came here very focused on jobs and programs, but I’ve been able to lift my head out of that and see the universal sector and landscape of higher education.”