Willie Sullivan

From performing in community theater to singing in the chorus to playing in the band, Arkansas-native Willie Sullivan 21FTMBA has a strong passion for the performing arts. After majoring in music from Arkansas State University, he pursued becoming an opera singer by obtaining a master’s degree. He packed his bags and headed to the University of Michigan where several former prominent African American opera singers teach, including George Shirley who was the first black man to sing a leading role in New York City’s Metropolitan Opera in the 1960s.

The standard path for many young American opera singers is to audition and to participate in varying regional operas across the country. “That's what I did for a couple of years, and I really got burnt out pretty quickly. It's very isolating, and even if you're doing a performance, you're always thinking about what's the next gig. It's just a really transient lifestyle,” he said. Willie returned to the University of Michigan and assumed a fundraising role at the performing arts organization and nonprofit called the University Musical Society. During this role, Willie worked with data and data analysis, which eventually lead a close friend to suggest he consider pursuing an MBA to help advance his career.

Willie recalled, “I thought this was an opportunity that could change the whole trajectory of my career. I really wanted to go all in on this to really shake out this whole performing arts thing and make sure that I'm not limiting myself too early in my life and my career.”

With close friends and family in Atlanta, Emory University and Goizueta quickly ended up on Willie’s radar. However, due to his untraditional background of an incoming MBA student, he found himself nervous to keep up academically. As a student entering Goizueta through The Consortium, Willie soon realized the powerful resources at his disposal, including that of Goizueta’s immersive programs.

Willie has tried to capitalize on every opportunity at Goizueta, including creating the first John R. Lewis Racial Justice Case competition. With corporations working in tandem with the Black Lives Matter movement, the student-run competition, named in honor of the late John Lewis, connects corporations and students to create innovative and actionable racial justice initiatives within those corporations.

Creating the competition is one of the biggest impacts Willie said he’s achieved while a student, but he believed Goizueta created an open door to make it happen. “I did not go in thinking that first of all, we'd be in a situation where there was this big racial justice protest at the peak of a global pandemic, but I also didn't think that I was going to have this idea and that it was going to come to fruition as quickly and as largely as it did,” he said. “That's still something that just really surprises me.”

As an alum, Willie will continue to focus on the competition and look at ways to expand its impact to other universities. “I plan to stay involved with this initiative as a very engaged alumnus, because this is something that I feel like really put Goizueta at the forefront of this conversation. For me, I don't really feel like I'm leaving it behind. I feel like we're just continuing to grow.”

Willie’s passion for racial equity won’t stop at graduation. He’ll be starting a full-time job at Deloitte in the fall where he hopes to continue working with the company’s diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. “I'm really hoping that I can be a part of that and can continue to bring some of the learnings that I've had through doing this work here into my full-time job. There's so much energy around this topic, and people are really looking at it in a very different way than they were even before I started business school. It’s very exciting to be a part of an organization like Deloitte that impacts so many different areas.”