When I started college, my goal was to go to law school. And so I was an English major, and I started with this clear plan in mind and actually obtain my degree. But while I was working to obtain my degree, I started working in the computer lab on the campus at the university I was attending, and I had an opportunity after I graduated to work at the University full time in their computer department, and I thought that would be a good way to take a couple of years and save some money for law school. So I did that. And the short answer is, I never left technology. After that, it was right around the time of the dot com, and a friend of mine was working on the coast, and he invited me to come work with him and I moved to California and started my technology career in earnest there. So many of the people I work with don't have a liberal arts education background, but I've always thought that should never stop anybody who's interested in technology because there's a lot you can do in the world in terms of how you write and how you communicate. That is really valuable that many people who have more of technical education. Sometimes they overlook that side of it.

The biggest responsibility I have is making sure that the company I work for, the bank that I worked for is secure every day. And that has to do with helping the people at the bank understand this as well as working on our technology systems. So I work in both domains, both the people side and the technology side every day. And sometimes that's educating business units on how to be safe when they're working on the Internet world, In the connected world, we're in social media and everything, and sometimes that's working with engineering teams to do something like stand up a firewall or another piece of technology. So my daily time I work a regular day, probably between eight and five most days. And if there's an incident or a security event or something that occurs, I'm on call. So I always have my cell phone with me, which probably most people do anyway. But it's kind of an expectation that my work can contact me at any time, day or night and say we have a situation that's arisen and we need your help now. Those don't occur every day. They don't even occur every week. It's just the potential for that to happen. And so when I am on vacation, I try to make an arrangement with an alternate leader to cover for me when I'm out so that I can actually get that vacation. But most of the time it's a regular work schedule. Occasionally I'll travel to a conference or to another office of a company, but it's probably less than three or four weeks I figure that I'm traveling.

The people that I work closely with are our technology leaders and business leaders. So, for example, one of the people I work very closely with is my immediate leader, the Chief Information Officer. And she has responsibility for every aspect of our technology world. Not just the security, but the way these systems are written and coded and how they're deployed and how they're supported. I worked closely with project teams. We do a lot of project work at the bank, so the leaders of these teams with some of them are project managers. Some of them are Directors of Programs, are their titles, and I work with business leaders. I work with, in our case, it would be bankers, people who are responsible for lending to customers and setting up deposit account for customers. We work with them some bits of educational, some bits understanding their needs so we could build better security solutions for them.