>> So I was a finance major at Penn State.
You know, found the studies interesting, along with Penn State,
but finance was never really a true calling to me.
But I liked the rigor that it provided.
I knew coming out of college I wanted to do some sort of rotational [inaudible].
I wasn't dead set on what exactly I wanted to do.
I wanted to be able to explore a few different avenues.
I was lucky enough to do an internship after my junior year at GE,
their finance management program, which really opened my eyes to this whole nature
of productivity and quality and Six Sigma.
I then discovered a rotational program at JPMorgan Chase that one of their elements
of it was productivity and quality.
I applied for that program through the on-campus recruiting,
was lucky enough to receive an offer.
It was a program called Internal Consulting Services,
more or less kind of like management consulting [inaudible] Deloittes of the world,
but doing it internally for Deloitte, rotated through the company every six months or so.
And that really gave me broad exposure not only to different functions within the company
but certainly getting to know the company very well.
And also building a broad network of about 80 or so recent graduates
that started this program with myself.
Went through several rotations.
Towards the end of the program, you're supposed to place within JP Morgan.
I was doing a lot of soul searching as to what interested me, what didn't interest me
and landed on strategy and continuing to do more of this consultant work.
JP Morgan being a bank doesn't offer a lot of those opportunities so I started opening
up the idea to looking outside JP Morgan as well as inside and discovered an opportunity
at Deloitte in their Internal Corporate Strategy group.
I was lucky enough to get the role, and I transitioned to Deloitte and I spent a little
over five years in that team doing the internal corporate strategy for Deloitte,
working on a lot of high-level, very interesting projects that, you know, were directly involved
with the senior management of the company or even just a single business unit.
Really learned a ton about strategy consulting in Deloitte.
And about a little over a year and a half ago, when the CEO was about to transition
to his new role, I got tapped to join his team and continue on in the form of research
and analysis standpoint, directly supporting him and then I decided to make that change.