>> So I've got a different path, absolutely, in my career.
Started out, at Penn State, both in microbiology, but I was also an ROTC student.
So I knew upon graduation that I was going to go into the Navy.
The other kind of piece of microbiology was I always kind of thought, I think coming in was
that I was going to be pre-med and at some point go to medical school.
So upon graduation, I was commissioned in the Navy, and the path was that I basically had
to go to my ship, earn my what's called a Warfare Pin, some kind of,
basically spend two years there and earn that and then I could flat
out transfer into go into medical school.
Ended up spending four years there, and what I learned is, once I got to my ship
and I was actually managing people immediately, which was interesting and a wake up call for me,
and it just made me grow up very quickly, what I learned is that I loved it.
I loved the leadership aspect of the military, I loved managing people, I loved connecting
with people, and so when that two year timeframe came up, I basically said I didn't want to go
to medical school anymore and I wanted to continue to do what I was doing.
So I ended up staying on that ship for two deployments.
We made one to the Persian Gulf, which was pre-Iraq war and then one
that was during the Iraq War, in kind of '05 timeframe.
Just amazing experience; wouldn't change it for the world.
And then I came back and had an opportunity to actually go work in the Pentagon for the Head
of Strategy for the Navy, which was amazing.
So I spent a year and a half working in the Pentagon.
At that point, I had a mentor that was in the military that had previously gone
to the Harvard Kennedy School, and so he was pushing me more toward actually going
into business school, after the military,
and that being the right transition to get into the civilian world.