Going Places

On the Move

It wasn’t only her career experience that prepared Elsenhans for this expansive new role. Indeed, it would be easy to argue that her upbringing more than nudged her toward a nomadic life of achievement and barrier breaking in the energy industry. In fact, oil is in her blood.

Lynn Elsenhans

Elsenhans’s father spent his career in a variety of research and marketing jobs for Exxon USA, now ExxonMobil, and his work kept the family moving. Lynn was born in New Jersey, but a job opportunity for her father at Humble Oil in Houston prompted the family to move south. The family returned to New Jersey and then had another stint in Houston. When she finished her sophomore year of high school, it was time to move again, this time to Westport, Connecticut. “That was the hardest move,” she recalls. “I had been involved in a lot of things in Houston, and it was difficult to leave and restart everything.”

There were advantages to the moves, though. Not only did they help her learn to be adaptable, but also the Texas and Connecticut high schools had complementary academic strengths. “The schools I went to in Texas were strong in math and science, and I found that I was ahead in those subjects when I got to Connecticut,” she says. “The schools in Connecticut actually were much stronger in foreign languages, English, and history. By the time I got to Rice, I felt like I had a well-balanced education.”

But if Elsenhans had listened to her high school guidance counselor, she may never have ended up at Rice. Raised in a family that valued education, she never had any doubt that she would go to college, and when it came time to start investigating schools, she immediately thought of Rice. She still had friends in Houston, and she had known other people who had attended the school. She was attracted to its reputation in math, engineering, and science as well as to its size. “I liked the idea of a much smaller school,” she says. “I was involved in a lot of things in high school, but I wasn’t very social. The residential college system seemed like it would be a good fit for me.”

Most of the students in Elsenhans’s high school were focused on getting into the Ivy League or other northeastern universities, so when Elsenhans mentioned that her top choice for college was Rice, the guidance counselor knew very little about it. Even after he had done research, he wasn’t exactly encouraging. “He looked up some things on selectivity and said, ‘I’m not sure you’ll get into this place,’” she recalls. “I said, ‘Well, I’m going to try.’” She got in.

Happy to be back in Houston, Elsenhans embraced every aspect of life at Rice. She played on the school’s first women’s intercollegiate basketball team, she was in the band, she was elected to student government, she was the sports editor for the Thresher, and she was a student representative on the Examinations and Standings Committee. And yes, somehow she still managed to find time to excel in school and become, while not an extrovert, at least social in a way she had never been before. “For me, it was the total experience, both inside and outside the classroom,” she says. “It was absolutely excellent for me.”

There also were glimmers of the kind of success she would later achieve. “She was rather unassertive and unassuming,” remembers Ronald Stebbings, who was master of Jones College. “She was not forceful in the sense that some are.” Yet Stebbings noticed that when she did assert herself, people took notice. “People listened carefully when she spoke because she gathered her thoughts and had something useful to say.”

Lori Herlin ’78, a classmate and fellow math–science major, was struck by the steely determination Elsenhans had, even as an 18-year-old. On the basketball team, which did not win a lot of games, her competitiveness came out. “She hung in there and worked very hard and didn’t like it when they lost,” recalls Herlin. “That kind of intensity and focus you could see early on.” Not that Elsenhans was a fun-averse grind, says Herlin. “Over time, she developed more socially and was more outgoing. She had lots of friends and hung out with people from lots of colleges.”

Looking back now, Elsenhans can easily point to the many ways she believes Rice prepared her for her career and life. What she remembers from the classroom, she says, isn’t so much specific lessons but the way teachers encouraged students to work through problems. “The thing that has helped me the most is critical thinking,” she explains. “Rice is very much oriented toward developing people from young adults into adulthood through critical thinking rather than training in specifics.”

In class, whether the professor was Ken Kennedy, Terry Doody, or Franz Brotzen, and also at Jones College, Elsenhans knew that her thinking and assumptions would be challenged. “It was about how to go about solving a problem and communicating a logical and persuasive argument,” she says. “They taught you how to approach a problem and get the data you could and be able to go forward even if you didn’t have all the data you needed or wanted. It’s a classic business situation: you never have everything you need.”

The practice she had juggling academics, athletics, band, and all her other activities also was good training for someone who eventually would manage thousands of employees in time zones around the world. “I did a lot of things,” she says. “Learning how to organize my time and make good on commitments and not overextend has really helped me going forward.”