um, I'm the VP of research at NYC and company. So where The official Tourism bureau and on what you call a boomerang So that what that means is actually, early in my career, I was also at the Tourism Bureau from 2000 to 2 2000 for And then a couple of years ago, I came back. Um, and it's one of these stories about the power of networking. Right? Um, my boss, who I had in 2002 actually called me up for my job. At that time, I was a media planner, um, at an ad agency. And she's like, Hey, you want to work for me and we got a market research position open. She was like, Great, let's do this. And she was actually somebody when I was 19 actually interned for at a market research company. So five years later, she gets me to come over to NYC and company, and I spent a couple of years there prior to getting my MBA. And so what happened is I you know, I stayed at the Tourism Bureau till about 6 4007 and I spent about 11 years really exploring my career as a Web analyst working at Social Media Analytics. I did product marketing. I did all these things. They did start ups like big Fortune 500 companies. And I said, I am done with all of this stuff. And so but I ended up happening. Waas um I had three different layoffs, and at the last layoff, I just I met up with my boss and just had a chat over Mexican food and, you know, be open on my seeing company. I'm like, This is great. I'm happy to come back. I have all these new experiences. I have all of these things that I've done. So the story isn't I applied and I did this and I got there. It's actually like, Wow, Okay, you follow the same people throughout your path. It's really about the power of networking. Um, what incidences and experiences shaped your career path. I mean, you know, when I talk about who I am and this is this is my stock answer when I would talk on interviews or were you know, when I talk in these kind of podcasts or you know things about my life, I always say that everything for me needs to a fascination on a never ending quest in my life to learn about why people do what they do. And it's the it's the strain that that goes to everything that I do as a researcher, right? I'm constantly curious about how do you apply data to people and that curiosity has been the rial driving force of the innovative work that I've done and where I am right now. Um, so again, that's really is really so to summarize this story. No, careers are a lot of lock and a lot of knowing people. And, you know, you use your network to get where you need to go, and then you also have these internal passions that you can also bring to toe life. For me. That's really like I said. It's this idea of people and their behavior and measuring that endlessly coffin it so

And the funny thing is, I work in travel and tourism, but I actually don't travel much. I think this is one of the misconceptions of the industry. It's actually we're talking about most people, and I see and company don't travel. Even though we're a travel organization, they don't travel for work. But there's a lot of travel enthusiasts within the company, right, people who like to go on vacations and plan them and talk about them, and it's a big part of their life. But I was a part of the job. It's actually very little travel. I've only really gone toe like conferences, right? I haven't gone anywhere to really like, you know, meet people. There's a small percentage of the company that does, but not not not too many people working from home. I mean, I think you know the answer to that. Everybody's working from home right now. Eso we went from fully being in the office all the Time Creek ove it. I'm not exactly sure when that's going to change. Maybe sometime around Labor Day and responsibilities and decisions. Um, how do I answer that question? So, you know, right now I'm on a team of two. We were a team of floor pre cove it. And again, what I really focused on is this human behavioral aspect of tourism to New York using data sources like website data. Um, social media data. Um, no. Even some of the mobile location data you've probably heard about that's coming to prominence during Cove it to understand people's behaviors, who they are, what they're doing. That's the part of tourism at New York City that I own. My boss owns a lot more of the, you know, hotel stop and economic impact and mawr of the on the grounds. No sort of metric things that are happening in New York City. So we have this kind of balance between what I do and what she does and really comes together. Nice

now because everybody probably knows what's happening in the tourism industry right now. It's been decimated. Um, you know, organizations mostly. You know, hotels don't are not hiring workers, restaurants or not open Forget attractions. They're not open either. So the challenges in the industry are monumental, and generation is the generational shift that's happening right now. How are we going to get back to this level of tourism? So the biggest challenge right now is really no understanding that we're kind of not able to do much in terms of understanding the consumer and what you know, the traveler to New York City, right? We're a little bit on in on a holds, right. We can't measure what's happening, and this is actually a very hard thing to explain to people because everybody's like, oh, forecast tourism for the next year forecast toward them for the next two years. And the response to this The reason that it's so challenging is the situation is still fluid Right now, What I mean by fluid is, um, the the day to day, you know, the governor of New York says up school are open rope. Schools are closed. You know, the president of the U. S. Says up. We're closing. You know, UK people coming here. We're closing the borders from Canada. Oh, no, we're opening them. You can't make these kinds of forecast that everybody wants. They all want to know what's gonna happen. Tell us. Tell us. Look into the crystal ball and we can't do it. Right. So it's a frustrating position as, ah researcher to be able to be like, Well, you have to take the context into account. No, this isn't We can't actually really do our jobs in terms of forecasting more.