Alumni Center

Our first edition of Beyond Ward Circle profiles Seth Ingall, who received his B.S. in CLEG from SPA in 1988 and a JD from AU’s Washington College of Law in 1992. While at AU, Seth worked evenings at GEICO as a claims interviewer and steadily progressed through the GEICO ranks to become a regional vice president, with general management responsibilities for GEICO’s New York Profit Center based in Woodbury, N.Y. He is also a member of GEICO's board of directors.

Chip: What are your responsibilities as regional vice president at GEICO?

Seth: I am responsible for a roughly $2.5 billion property & casualty insurance business. General management of a very large regional operation with everything that an insurance company would ordinarily have, from sales to customer service, to claims, everything that would fall into any of those buckets, to managing a 250,000 square feet building and other satellite offices and the 3,000 people working here, it is a 24-hour operation.

Chip: And how did you come to work for GEICO?

Seth: I started at GEICO in Chevy Chase, Maryland, which is a couple of miles from American University right after my sophomore year at college, part-time summer job.

Chip: So this has really been almost your whole career at GEICO, correct?

Seth: Yes, I have been here 22 years, it will be 23 in June of '09. I enjoyed working, so after the summer, I extended my hours and moved as many classes as possible to the evenings and continued working during my junior and senior years at AU.

Chip: Great. And you graduated with a CLEG degree, I believe, right?

Seth: Yes, inter-disciplinary studies in Communications, Legal institutions, Economics and Government, Graduated in '88 and in '89, I began law school at AU at night, and graduated in three years with a JD in May of '92.

Chip: What drew you to the CLEG major? I guess as opposed to sort of the more traditional political science. And I should say I started out with CLEG, I ended up going to political science myself.

Seth: I think what drew me to CLEG was that it had a little bit of everything. I was definitely interested in political science and or something that might be pre-law, but I didn't know for certain if that's what I wanted and so CLEG offered a little bit of everything.

Chip: What drew you to American University itself?

Seth: I applied to Boston, Syracuse, American, and GW and I was accepted at all of them. I was going to apply to a Big-Ten school, Northwestern and several others, but I decided against it, because they were much larger than what I wanted. I wanted something in the 5,000-student range, give or take a few, in or near a city.

And I have relatives in the area and so Washington seemed like a good place. In Washington, the two schools of the right size with my academic credentials were American and GW and I was fortunate enough to get into both of them. I liked more of the suburban environment that American has as opposed to the downtown setting that GW has and that was my decision.

Chip: Where did you grow up?

Seth: I grew up in Highland Park, Illinois, suburb of Chicago along the north shore.

Chip: Do you have any specific memories that stand out from your time at AU? Are there things there that particularly influenced you from a career standpoint?

Seth: I think a lot of the professors influenced me from a career perspective. GEICO obviously is a very large company today. It was a pretty large company when I was in school, but a lot of the professors encouraged me to do different things and look at different areas in GEICO, which I think helped me understand a lot of what I have come to learn about my company.

In addition, some of the professors suggested that I look at other industries, too, and in the summer between my junior and senior years, I worked at Charles E. Smith (real estate) during the day and I worked at GEICO at night.

Generally, the professors encouraged learning as much as I could about lots of different industries, so that when I eventually decided what I wanted to do, I was well equipped to make sure that my decision was based upon good solid experience as opposed to unanswered questions.

Chip: Actually that sounds frankly very similar to my own experience where I did the same sort of thing, ditching day-time classes in order to work full time.

Seth: Right. And whether it was during school or during the summer, I tried to do as much as I could primarily because the professors were motivating me.

Chip: Who is the most interesting person you have met in your job and why does it stand out to you?

Seth: The most interesting person would be Warren Buffett. And why? Not so much because of his success or wealth, but from an intellectual perspective - he can take any subject and bring it down to an elementary school level, such that both he and whoever he may be speaking with, have a clear understanding of all the ramifications that might potentially be related to that subject.

Chip: Are there particular challenges that you have faced in your career that you look back and say, what I picked up at AU really helped me?

Seth: Having attended law school, and practiced as a litigator in various jurisdictions, I’ve been trained me to look at practically every business situation that I encounter and analyze it from all corners such that I am confident I arrive at a sound decision. Law school is so disciplined in how it trains people to think that I don't think I could successfully break down any number of the different issues that show up on a day-by-day basis if I didn't have that background.

Chip: What advice might you offer to AU students who look at you and say: I really like what he has done, how can I do something similar? Not necessarily in the same company or the same industry, but just capitalizing on your time and things to advance.

Seth: Never underestimate the power of hard work. While you can clearly be one of the smartest people in the world , you don't necessarily have to be smartest person in the world in order to be successful. What you need to do is take a good solid foundation and apply it with hard work to produce success. In many respects, attitude is every bit as important as intellect.

Chip: Are there other questions that you think I should ask you or anything else you'd like to let people know about you?

Seth: None other than I married my college sweetheart and we remain happily married with two kids.

Chip: How did you meet her?

Seth: I met her primarily in the Letts/Anderson Quad when I was a sophomore and she was a freshman and then we started dating when I was a junior and she was a sophomore.