So probably the best way for me to start is when I was in high school, I decided I wanted to have a career that was going to make the world a better place. But to be honest, I really did not have a good idea of what that was or what that wouldn't tell. My father was a physician, so I thought maybe being a doctor would be something I would be good at and so when I went to university, I enrolled in a chemistry class and within about three class periods, I realized that there was absolutely no way that I could ever be a doctor and it is just not for me. I didn't understand or it just didn't click with my personality and so what happened is I actually left to do some volunteer service work in Africa for two years, and while I was there, I was in a little village and I saw these children that were playing on this merry go round that had been created by a group of engineers and what happened is when they played on the merry go round, it would actually generate electricity for the village. I realized that I love the idea of creating physical products that could make people's lives better. So when I came back from that experience, went back to my university, I decided that I was going to major in both engineering and business because I wanted to have the technical abilities to build those products but then I needed to have the business acumen to distribute those products throughout the world. I ended up studying engineering for my undergraduate in manufacturing engineering and then I worked for two and a half years as a medical device engineer, so I would help design and fabricate medical devices mostly used for treating radiology and heart patients. Then I realized it was time for me to go back and get the business side of things so I went back to graduate school at BYU and did a master's in engineering as well as MBA, Masters of Business Administration. When I was at BYU, I was introduced to the field of consulting, which for anyone unfamiliar is we are essentially hired to give professional advice to companies and so I usually most of my days now are spent meeting with executives, managers and helping them to solve complex business problems, specifically around strategy and operations type work, and so that's what I do know as I work for a company called Deloitte Consulting and usually travel on a regular basis working with usually large fortune 500 level companies. I'm hoping to do that for a couple of years, and then we'll see what the future holds after that.

So let's talk about the schedule first, a day in the life of a management consultant is a little different than what you would do in a typical 9 to 5 job. So most weeks look like this, on Monday morning, I will wake up usually very early around four o'clock, and then I will usually catch a six or seven o'clock flight from the airport to wherever my client happens to be located. So I've lived in Boston as well as Salt Lake City, but I fly to clients all over the country, to Michigan to North Carolina to New York City to California. I'll land at the client site on Monday morning, and then Monday to Thursday we will spend with the client and that involves meetings with their executives, it involves putting together presentations, conducting interviews with various people in the big business to research problems, creating models in excel to analyze data. Then before we leave on Thursday, we usually present a summary of our findings to the executive team of the client, and then I get back on the airplane and I fly back to my home, my own city. Fridays are a little different and Fridays are usually spent either working from home or they're spent in one of our firm's local offices, where we have access to other practitioners and other members. So working hours could be long, I work from usually eight in the morning, and if I'm at the client site, we usually stop working around 10 or 11 at night. My Fridays are more relaxed, I usually will work till about three or four in the afternoon and then Friday, Saturday, Sunday, I'm at home with my family, so it's like an overall schedule. In terms of responsibilities and decisions that are handle at work, it really depends on the project. When you start as a consultant, you will start as an analyst and you'll be given a very small portion of the project to work on. As you move up through the hierarchy, you get more and more responsibility and what we call a workstream until the very top level when you're a partner at a firm, your job is to actually sell consulting engagements to clients and provide general direction to the team.

The main tools that I use at work are, the one tool in that order would be PowerPoint, which we used to actually facilitate business discussions with an executive audience and Excel and that's where we do most of our calculations and data crunching. Aside from those two other tools that we use quite a bit are Tableau, which is like a data visualization tool, we use SQL, which pulls data from databases, we use sometimes R and Python, which are programming languages to perform advanced data science calculations and then we have some proprietary tools that will use for specific situations, like one example is a tool that we use called Llamasoft, which is a software tool that actually analyzes a supply chain of a company to see how long it takes to shift from point A to point B in the country.