By Sommer Hamilton

How do you best transfer materials to countries at war? How do you equip companies dealing with different political and energy climates? And, what’s the most effective way to account for it all?

Mays Business School students encountered the underlying details of those procurement, transport and accounting challenges this summer as the first student interns to pitch in with Halliburton subsidiary KBR’s mission to provide vital life support and logistical services to the U.S. Army and Coalition Forces in the Middle East.

In a fall 2004 visit to Mays, Halliburton CEO Dave Lesar told administrators he wanted only the best interns to help Halliburton in the Middle East. That’s where 12 Aggie interns — nine of them Mays students — came in this summer, part of KBR’s government and infastructure crew on projects in Kuwait and Jordan and in the Middle East Regional Office in Dubai.

Kuwait-based interns and their co-workers gather at Camp Udairi in Kuwait during a site visit to the camp. KBR runs logistical operations from Udairi, including air transportation.

“This is not your typical, 8 to 5, weekends-off internship. You have to have a strong work ethic and discover that you can deal with conditions that are out of your hands to do anything like this,” says Graham Gilkerson, a senior accounting major who spent his summer auditing employee records and overseeing accruals and inventories for KBR subcontractors in Kuwait City.

Mutual training

KBR is facing natural hazards as well as man-made ones as the military’s supplier of logistical and life support services in such places as Iraq and Afghanistan. In the face of incapacitating sandstorms, oppressive heat and the realities of an insurgency, KBR is charged with supplying everything the U.S. Military and Coalition Forces need, aside from the guns in soldiers’ hands, to complete their mission.

That means it has to rely on the best people and the most innovative technologies to build base camps and deliver food, mail, fuel and crisp laundry to the soldiers stationed across the Middle East.

KBR division leaders are turning to students including Mays business undergraduates and MBAs to bring advanced knowledge and progressive ideas to the forefront, says Gary M. Gerber, a senior staffing and college recruitment specialist for KBR’s Government & Infrastructure headquarters in Arlington, Va. Gerber facilitated the recruitment and coordination of the Aggie interns this summer.

“We’re in the services industry, and our people are our most important asset,” Gerber says. “We like to groom people like Mays MBAs and undergraduates to bring their perspective and their learning to us. It’s a mutual training process.”

Not in the classroom

The tradeoff for the students, many of whom spent 10 weeks this summer working 60- and 80-hour weeks that mirror the pace of trade in the logistical capitals of Kuwait City and Dubai, is just as great. The students talk of quickly adjusting to a schedule that had them hard at work in the midst of bustling trade and warehousing centers, dealing with heat and humidity that immediately condensed on their skin and left watch-faces fogged over, and eating lunch with transporters heading into Iraq who discussed the true costs of war.

For Gilkerson, a Professional Program student who started studying Arabic with a tutor last year, working with an energy company in an international setting and helping out any way he can is the first step in an ideal career path.

“This summer definitely peeked my interest,” Gilkerson says. “It gives me the desire not only to look at what businesses are doing in international settings, but what effect it has on the people there, what they’re going through and what the economy looks like.”

Trey Scott, a finance major working in the buzzing multicultural center of Dubai — where he saw more cranes constructing buildings than buildings themselves — grew confident in himself as a person as well as a businessman.

Joining four co-workers in a restaurant in Dubai this summer amid white-robed Arabic men and Western-garbed KBR employees, Scott realized each person at his table was from a different part of the world. “I learned a lot about myself,” he says. “It prepared me for the business world. You have to be able to deal with people outside Texas — you have to really understand what that means.

“And you can’t learn that in class.”

Next generation of managers

Scott, who worked in accounting at KBR’s Dubai central office for Middle Eastern projects, said he’s definitely interested in a career at Halliburton.

That’s one of the planned-for side effects of the intensive, on-the-job Middle East internship experience CEO Dave Lesar first offered to Mays students last year. Just about half the people who intern with KBR are hired on full-time or return as interns, says KBR collegiate staffing specialist Gary Gerber.