George R. Shannon attended The University of Texas at Austin on a football scholarship, where he graduated with Honors. He then was accepted and attended the UT Austin Graduate School of Business MBA program for two semesters. George left the MBA program to join the Merrill Lynch account executive training program in New York, to become a Merrill Lynch Account Executive in Houston. After a year as a stockbroker with Merrill Lynch in Houston, George applied for the Ph.D. program in economics at the University of Texas at Austin, was accepted into that Ph.D. program and took graduate coursework in Economics for two years. While in Austin he was recruited by Rotan Mosle, at that time the oldest