My name is Walter Shields. I'm a first-year MBA student in the Price College of Business...but don't assume you can guess my whole story from there!

Actually, I came to the field of business in a rather roundabout way. It's true that for the past five years I have worked for Midland Mortgage Co. in Oklahoma City, where I started out writing letters, then moved on to help manage the Customer Service call center, and finally became a financial analyst, preparing departmental financial statements and productivity and control reports for in-house use. But it was rather a long road getting there. At 31, I'm one of the oldest students in the full-time program, and I probably also have one of the longest and most varied histories in terms of what I have done to support myself financially over the past thirteen years.

My MIS professor states that a personal website "can be an important means by which you present yourself...to employers, potential employers, clients and others." I don't doubt this, and portions of this website will endeavor to present those things about me that are relevant to my chosen career path. However, given my rather rudimentary knowledge of HTML, I couldn't think of any intrinsically interesting way to present the dry facts of my business persona using the tools and features we're expected to incorporate. Therefore, most of my links and multimedia features have to do with one small aspect of my life: my travels in Europe, and especially the time I spent in France during the 1994-95 school year as a teaching assistant in the Lycee Voillaume in Aulnay-sous-Bois.

Click on the map below to read about my year in France, and also about my brief visits to Italy and the U.K.

But enough about me...sign my guestbook and tell me a little about yourself!