Written by Ethan Creel

With experience in recruitment, service, and upper management, Samuel McGarr brought a wide range of knowledge to his role as McCain Executive-in-Residence in fall 2020.

After graduating from the University of Alabama, McGarr went to work at KPMG, where he remained for 36 years. His work at KPMG began in their Birmingham office, but over time, McGarr worked in the Atlanta, New York, and South Florida offices where his roles included tax partner in charge for the Southeast, national sector leader for healthcare, and national sector leader for private equity. Since then, McGarr has worked as an adjunct professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

During his time at BSC, McGarr has helped with course planning and review, as well as teaching the Tax I and II courses. When asked about his time as executive-in-residence, McGarr says that he does this work as a way to give back and give forward. This is a key part in producing a continuing cycle of skillful and productive graduates, he explains.

McGarr recalls that it took him very little time to notice a difference in BSC’s culture of learning.

“It is a tricky task to implement a liberal arts education into more technical fields, such as accounting and business, but the educational structure at Birmingham-Southern achieves this almost seamlessly,” McGarr says. “From my experience, the people we hired from larger universities had, sometimes, more training in the technical sections, but our hires from Birmingham-Southern had the knowledge of how to tie the technical portion to the people we were serving. The ability to speak the ideas of the practice in terms that other people can understand is vital.”

McGarr is a worker with drive and grit, and he is doing his part to emphasize these qualities in his teaching. McGarr believes that skill is not the sole determinant in what makes a good worker.

“Birmingham-Southern is a difficult school, but it doesn’t get any easier after college. It takes grit, it takes pushing through the unpleasant in order to get anywhere,” McGarr says.

When asked about a piece of advice applicable to incoming first-year students and recent graduates, McGarr said, “The most important thing anyone can do, regardless of where they are in their walk, is learn from failure. Taking in success is easy, embracing failure is what is difficult, but it is also what’s more rewarding. Life is full of failure – you have to learn to turn that failure into a learning experience and then you will truly grow.”

McGarr ties this experience to a something Harry Truman said. Truman, known as “Give Them Hell Harry,” once said, “I didn’t give anybody hell. I just told them the truth, and they thought it was hell.” Life, in this case, is much the same. Embrace the failure, and embrace the truth.