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by Sherri Smith

Dubai is the part people notice. From a distance, the skyline looks like the future arrived early. But for Alaric Harrell ’99, Dubai isn’t a postcard. It’s his Tuesday.

In 2023, Harrell moved to the United Arab Emirates to become chief accounting officer for Vantage Drilling International. Now a resident of Dubai, he oversees accounting operations across a global offshore drilling fleet. It’s the kind of work that requires not just technical precision, but the ability to communicate across teams, time zones and cultures.

He got there by following a simple rule: “Every time you have an opportunity, take it.”

Harrell didn’t learn that rule in a classroom. He learned it on the job and then built his career on saying yes to difficult assignments. While based in Houston for many years, his work as an internal auditor for Transocean required extensive travel across West Africa, South America, Asia and Europe. Those were the jobs that accelerated everything.

“You get offered something, you could say no,” he said. “But if you say yes … it works out to be a very good experience.”

That willingness to put himself in the room early started at Â鶹ӳ»­Ó°Òô. Just before his senior year of high school, Harrell chose to participate in a six-week minority scholars bridge program on campus. There, he met mathematics associate professor Richard “Doc” Price, now retired, and Freddie Titus, now vice president for student affairs, both of whom became pivotal mentors after he enrolled in 1994. Price would go on to teach Harrell’s business calculus class, while Titus served as adviser to the LU chapter of his fraternity, Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc.

Price had spent decades mentoring Black students in some of the University’s most demanding programs. And as a fraternity adviser, Titus was steady, direct and not inclined to let students drift. For Harrell, that mattered. It showed him what was possible and what was expected.

He saw another version of that possibility up close. His aunt, an accountant only five years his senior, would take him to dinner when her work brought her to Beaumont. She was already building a career that took her from Brazil to Canada, and he could see what it offered. Because she knew the language of the ledger, she could work anywhere in the world.

He started at Lamar as a general business major, but those conversations with his aunt sharpened his focus. Accounting offered something more than a job. It offered a portable skill set, one he could carry into any room, in any country. By the end of his first year, Harrell had committed to the major.

Then came Malcolm Veuleman.

On the first day of intermediate accounting, there was no introduction. No lecture. No syllabus. Just a quiz.

“We were like, ‘What are you talking about? You haven’t taught anything yet,’” Harrell recalled.

Veuleman, professor of accounting and business law, didn’t budge. “No, no, no, that’s not how it works,” he said. “You need to study on your own. You need to be prepared before you come to my class. That’s how the profession works.”

Veuleman also had a habit of testing his undergraduate students with actual CPA exam questions. When the class pushed back, he had an answer Harrell still laughs about: “CPAs don’t have to answer CPA exam questions anymore. You’re not a CPA yet.”

At the time, it felt like something to get through. Looking back, Harrell sees it differently. “Little old Lamar was actually good old Lamar,” he said. The University didn’t have the name recognition of a massive state flagship, but the professors made sure he was functionally bulletproof before he left.

Lamar gave him the technical foundation, but Harrell understood early that technical skills alone wouldn’t be enough. In energy and finance, accounting is about translation.

“The ability to communicate is the separator,” he said. “If you’re a techie accounting person, you can have a good career, but you won’t have the greatest career.” Leaders don’t want just numbers; they want to know what they mean.

After graduation, he kept saying yes, especially to the work no one else wanted, the chaotic corporate transitions that veterans usually avoid because they’re just too much work. At American Midstream, he was hired to transition an entire corporate office from Denver to Houston. It meant months of back-to-back travel and the constant risk of a high-profile collapse.

“Most times, those things fail,” Harrell said, “and nobody wants to be a part of a failing experience.” The work required merging two companies into a single system: rebuilding the chart of accounts and aligning ledgers across teams. “It’s a huge project where you’re trying to get everybody aligned,” he said. “You end up being the little engine that keeps pushing. You’re herding cats, trying to get everyone engaged in the effort while they’re still focused on their day jobs.”

By leaning into those kinds of high-risk, high-visibility projects, Harrell built a reputation for stepping into complexity and making sense of it. That reputation eventually carried him to Dubai.

Years of traveling for business abroad have also changed Harrell’s world in very personal ways. The globe feels much smaller than it did when he was growing up in Cleveland, Texas. “My world changed when I started traveling,” he said. “You realize the truth — that despite the noise of governments, people are the same.”

Today, Harrell lives in Dubai with his wife, Berdia Alisha Sells Harrell. Their son finished his last two years of high school there and has since moved back to the U.S. for college, while their daughter attends college in Texas. The move to the UAE has also given him something he didn’t always have earlier in his career: time. He’s back on the golf course, a hobby he once set aside so that when he was home from business trips, his time belonged to his family.

For students beginning their own journeys at Lamar, Harrell’s advice is pretty straightforward: Master the technical skills because you have to. Embrace difficult assignments. But above all, don’t wait for the lecture to start. Learn to tell the story behind the work yourself.

Dubai is the part people notice. The skyline, the scale, the distance from where he started. But for Harrell, it’s just where the work is. Turns out, he’s already in the