Julie Riley
As adolescents, we tend to conceptualize careers as single-trajectory paths with clear, familiar labels: doctor, politician, teacher, artist. Upon entering the workforce fulltime, though, many of us find ourselves staring down a road bristling with exits and junctures with names we’ve never contemplated. This was the case for current MBA candidate Julie C. Riley when she graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University with an English degree in 1993.
If you’d asked Riley then where she was headed, she’d have told you she was going to be a lawyer. As an undergraduate, she’d worked as a paralegal, and she had every intention of enrolling in law school by 1994. But that step kept getting pushed back, due to “fear, mostly,” Riley admits, “as well as an inability to work out the financial commitments. I started working and before I knew it, five years had passed. Another five years, and I was going to have kids. It felt like life kept getting in the way.”
She continued working as a paralegal for eight years after college before transitioning into banking. In 2004, she took a position with a subsidiary of GMAC Residential Capital, where she managed the process of acquiring residential real estate from some of the largest public and private homebuilders in the U.S. Between 2004 and 2008, she was promoted twice, ultimately serving as director of operations.
Then came the financial crisis and housing market collapse, and the business was forced to wind down. Because of her paralegal experience, Riley was asked to establish a Virginia subsidiary for GMAC’s mortgage operations, after which she took a position with SunTrust Banks as director of real estate operations. In 2011 she was invited to set up a Richmond branch for a nationwide title and settlement services company headquartered in North Carolina. She accepted and spent the next three years growing the business before returning to SunTrust in 2014, this time as an operational risk relationship manager — a job title she couldn’t have imagined when she started her career.
With 20 years of experience in finance, Riley was far from the path she’d first envisioned for herself, and yet she’d at last circled back to the move she’d been delaying: going back to school. Now, though, she’d decided her future growth hinged on an MBA. She knew an online program wasn’t for her, and says the University of Richmond’s reputation and networking opportunities made it a natural choice.
Since starting the program this spring, she’s taken classes in accounting and marketing, and already she’s applying coursework on the job. “I feel like I can contribute more,” she observes. “The things you learn in marketing are important in any situation in which you’re trying to get your ideas across to others.”
Communicating and selling ideas to others is a large part of Riley’s current position in risk management, as she collaborates with team members to ensure they’re performing their work in alignment with SunTrust’s enterprise risk framework. “My ‘clients’ are internal coworkers in other departments,” she explains. “Every time I touch my program, I try to think about what the impact is on my client and how I can sell it to them in a way that will help them see the value and want to be a part of it.”
In her work and at school, Riley draws upon traits she once predicted would make her a good lawyer: an inclination to assess situations from multiple perspectives and an insatiable need to get to the bottom of things. “I have always been the person in the room asking, ‘Why?’” she says. “I refer to myself as a ‘thread-puller,’ meaning that, when I sense there’s something more to [a situation], I can’t resist the urge to pull the thread to see where it leads.”
When asked where this thread leads, she says she anticipates pursuing her MBA will broaden and deepen her business knowledge, while giving her more confidence to explore new ideas. After a successful and varied career start and building a family in which she and her husband split parenting duties 50-50 while they work and she attends school, Riley jokes, “I still struggle to define what I want to be ‘when I grow up.’”
Not being able to define the future in a word hasn’t dimmed her outlook any, though. For now she says she’s enjoying the “opportunity to partner and participate with my fellow candidates in the work that will help us shape the future of business as tomorrow’s leaders. [It] may sound cheesy — but that’s really how I see it.”