By Marshall Swanson

“Do anything you can to get your foot in the door.”

Such advice for landing a first job out of college might have sounded desperate to Carolina graduates at last spring's commencement ceremonies, especially coming from Chris Matthews, the award-winning political commentator, writer, and host of MSNBC's Hardball With Chris Matthews.

After all, one could easily imagine Matthews being wooed by major media outlets when he first entered the work world.

Matthews' first job out of college? He was a security guard on Capitol Hill. Only after years of paying his dues did he emerge as one of the nation's pre-eminent journalists.

Larry Salters is director of the University of South Carolina's Career Center, which helps graduates realize the jobs of their dreams. He wasn't surprised by Matthews' story. Few people are going to start out at a Fortune 500 company, Salters said, and they don't have to.

“They can get great experience working in all kinds of jobs that turn out to be springboards to fantastic careers,” he said, and sometimes those career boosts occur in the most unexpected ways.

What was your first job, and what career advice would you give to new college graduates? Six noteworthy Carolina alumni talk about their first career steps, the memorable lessons those jobs provided, and their advice for upward mobility in today's competitive world.

Learning to live by your wits

Long before he became owner of the Houston Texans NFL team and headed other high-profile business ventures from his base in Houston, Bob McNair, '58, sold insurance for the Southern Colonial Life Insurance Co. in Columbia.

It was a part-time job while he was a student at USC, and when he graduated, it morphed into a full-time job as the company's regional sales manager. Both positions entailed working on straight commission. “If I sold something, I made money, and if I didn't, I didn't make any money, and I paid my own expenses,” McNair said. “It was learning to live by your wits.”

McNair stuck with the job for about six months before he took another position selling an advertising product to soft drink bottlers.

Later he was a sales manager for a Charlotte car leasing company started by a fraternity brother, but after five months the firm ran out of money, and McNair moved to Texas to start another car leasing business.

His first years out of school were “not a conventional beginning to a business career,” McNair said. But his first job impressed upon him the value of being able to sell something, which enabled him to develop “great confidence” that he could always make a living because “I had the ability to sell, and everybody is always looking for somebody who can produce.”

He learned from the job that “if you are willing to take more risk in terms of what you produce and what you are paid, you can make a lot more money than if you aren't willing to take risk,” he said. “You can make more money because the employer is taking less risk.”

His advice for today's graduates is not to set out to make money, at least not initially, but to look for ways they can add value to their organization. “The greater value you add to any position, the more you're worth,” he said. “Either your employer will recognize that and reward you, or his competitor will, and ultimately the money will come to you.”

Understanding redundancy and fun

Like Bob McNair, Michael J. Mungo, '50, president of the Mungo Foundation and founder of the Mungo Co., one of the state's largest real estate development firms, worked while he was a USC student.

That experience led directly to his first job out of college and to his later career success.

To pay his way through the University, Mungo was a sheetrock installer, sometimes working 60 hours a week. But the experience provided him with a first-hand education to the housing industry while also establishing his reputation as someone in the field who was educated and could be trusted.

Mungo continued sheetrock installation while he attended graduate school and as his first full-time job out of college. He then briefly entered a real estate partnership where he sold housing lots to builders. That experience led to his own real estate business in which he purchased desirable residential property and developed it into neighborhoods for prospective contractors. The business model worked “meteorically,” he said.

The key to his success was a fundamental knowledge of the housing industry from his sheetrock work, coupled with his University studies in government and psychology, he said. The latter created an awareness of the suburbanization that would sweep the country and what was necessary for successful residential development: infrastructure, accessibility, good schools, and the like.

Being successful in business means knowing that 90 percent of life is dull redundancy and 10 percent is fun, Mungo said. “You have to do the 90 percent to get the 10 percent,” he said. For today's students, Mungo recommends not waiting to get out of school before starting to work.

“They need to get a part-time job now and learn how to work,” he said. “It isn't easy, but once you learn it, it's like a bicycle and you can ride it.”

Whatever it took to keep going

By the time she graduated from USC in 1983, Alicia Sikes had already decided to make aviation her career. She's now an American Airlines pilot.

She began taking flying lessons in January of her senior year and by May 13 had her private pilot's license. On May 14 she received her bachelor's degree in computer science. That summer she began flight instructor training at Eagle Aviation in Columbia.

To defray some of the cost, she began working behind the counter at Eagle's flight school. A few months later she continued the same type of work with Pat and Jim Hamilton at Owens Field and Midlands Aviation where “the Hamiltons were so nice and really helped my career. Jim would have given me any airplane to fly.”

She did invoices, scheduled students, answered the phone, and “whatever else it took to keep going until I could build up enough time to get my instructor's certificate,” which she received 10 months to the day after she took her first flying lesson.

The experience of working at Eagle and Midlands Aviation was helpful in advancing her career because she got to “see other pilots who had more experience, talk with them about what they were doing, meet other interesting people who were passing through, and hang out at the airport,” she said.

She logged her first multi-engine flight time when a pilot announced he was going to take a plane for a test ride and asked if she wanted to go along. “When you had an opportunity to do something like that, you did it,” she said.

Her career has taken the airline transport pilot to several jobs at home and abroad with multiple airlines as a captain and first officer flying 727s, 767s, 757s, MD-80s, and DC-9s.

“Don't think that a first job is too menial,” said Sikes, who was TWA's first and only female 727 captain. “If it's in the career field you want, go ahead and take it.

“Internships also provide excellent opportunities, and they can turn into good jobs afterwards. With an internship you also have a chance to discover that certain careers might not be for you, which is better to find out earlier rather than later.”

Dispelling the doubts

Bernard Addison is a Los Angeles-based actor who has appeared in plays on and off Broadway, in movies, at the prestigious repertory company at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and in episodes of JAG, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Frasier, Law & Order, 24, and Weeds. He had a highly praised performance in August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone in Los Angeles, and narrated an Oscar-nominated documentary.

After he earned his bachelor's degree in theatre from Carolina, he went to the University of North Carolina for his master of fine arts degree, thinking that his first job from there would be in New York or Los Angeles.

Instead, he returned to Carolina to appear in summer repertory plays and to teach as an adjunct professor. He remembers thinking it was strange that his first job would be at his educational starting point. But he accepted the position anyway, believing it would allow him to pay off some college debt while living at home and re-establishing old professional ties.

His first job also gave him time for his career aspirations to gel and provided the entree for an audition with the Folger Shakespeare Theatre in Washington where he worked for three seasons before moving on to New York and Los Angeles.

“When I made my leap into the professional world, I didn't have as many doubts,” he said.

“When you're young and you go after something, there is a tendency to doubt yourself. Once I was able to put myself into the academic setting again, I could help my students deal with the practical realities of pursuing this profession and also solidify internally that this is what I really wanted to do.”

His advice for new graduates is to be honest with themselves and to listen to that internal voice that might not be 100 percent sold on what they're doing. “You have to be able to convince that voice that what you're doing is right for you,” Addison said. “It's just being honest with yourself, your beliefs, and your feelings. I think that will always direct you toward the path that you should be on.”

Thinking outside of the box

When Diane Claypoole Creel, '70, '74 master's, finished work on her bachelor's degree in print journalism, she needed a job that would sustain her while she worked on her master's degree in mass communications.

That job was a full-time position with the Columbia architectural and engineering firm of Lyles, Bissett, Carlisle, and Wolff where she wrote press releases and performed other promotional work.

“I was hungry,” said Creel, who today is chairman and CEO of Ecovation Inc., an environmental engineering technology firm in Victor, N.Y. Ecovation uses technology developed at Cornell University to create energy by microbiologically treating waste from the manufacture of products like cheese, wine, and other foods.

During her six years with Lyles, Bissett, she learned a lot about the architectural and engineering business and began to branch out into direct marketing, preparing proposals and presentations for clients and sales.

It was considered unprofessional for architects and engineers to promote themselves back then, and Creel now realizes that she was allowed to do things with the firm that were very progressive at the time. As a result, she was recruited to work for a string of engineering firms in Houston, Seattle, Denver, and Long Beach, Calif., where in the late 1980s and early '90s, she became chief operating officer, CEO, and chairman of the board of Earth Tech. She has been a CEO ever since.

Creel acknowledges that her first job out of college was not a traditional journalism career path, which dovetails with her advice for new college graduates: “Think outside the box from the way your career might be described in college.”

“Think of yourself as a great employee who wants to contribute to the success and growth of any organization you belong to, whether it's a non-profit, in corporate America, or a government agency.

“To become a vital part of that organization means that you have to step out of that box and learn a lot of things that you wouldn't have pictured yourself learning when you were in college,” she said. “If you listen well and communicate effectively, you can be successful.”

Getting paid to go to school

As president of Barrow, Hanley McWhinney & Strauss Inc. in Dallas, James P. Barrow, '62, is a professional investor and manager of portfolios, mutual funds, “and lots of other things” relating to the company's $60 billion in assets.

His first job was with the two-person investment department of the Citizens and Southern National Bank of South Carolina in Columbia where, with a starting salary of $3,850, he's convinced he was the lowest-paid person in his college class.

But he took the job “excitedly,” he said, because “I felt like they could teach me a business, and they were paying me, in a sense, to go to school. I thought the job was worthwhile because I had ambition and excitement, but no real skills because I didn't have any experience.”

Four years later, Barrow moved to a job with Atlantic Richfield in Philadelphia, and then to Dallas where he started his investment firm 27 years ago. But his first job remains memorable because even though it was a small place, he was getting valuable experience where “you had to do everything.”

Barrow is convinced he got his second job because he told the interviewer he would work for “whatever it takes” to get the job. “I figured that after two or three years they'd figure out what I was worth and pay me that,” he said.

Therein lies his advice for newly minted college graduates. “Get into the business you want and don't worry about the salary. It will work its way out. If you're good, they'll pay you what you're worth.”

Moreover, he said, when you join an organization, “you want to be as close as possible to where the decisions are being made. I would rather work near the decision point than make three times as much money.”

“It's the experience that's important,” Barrow said, “because after your first or second job, nobody is going to focus on your grades or your degree. They want to know what you've been doing, what responsibilities you've had, what changes you've made, and how good you are at making decisions.”