Born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah and I grew up in a really active family. Through this I started to luge, the sport of luge when I was eleven years old. From there, I made onto the national team and eventually I competed in two Olympics. It was after being on the national team for about fifteen years that I realized the there were a lot of other things aside from luge and sports that I wanted to accomplish in my life and so after the last Olympics, I decided that there's time for me to end my athletics career and to move on to other things I am still inspired to do. So I decided to go back to school at the University of Utah I finished my undergrad in business administration. During that time in my undergrad, I took several information systems classes. It is during those classes that I really became interested in information systems and technology. It was through that interests that kind of inspired me to look more into the Masters of Science and Information Systems program here at the U and from there I looked in the program. And I started looking at opportunities and job growth within the industry and realize that this is something that really interested me and and something that I want to pursue and so it was from from there that I decided to pursue this program at the University of Utah.

Within my program, I am specializing in business analytics and business intelligence. So within that, a lot of my classes are focused on statistics and using the program R. As I've become more familiar with R, I've realized the power of it and what you can do and how you can really take data from businesses and use that to run different analysis and come up with and solve business problems. So I find that really interesting and I found that really kind of empowering and and something that I find will be extremely useful for me looking for a career after after the program. I usually spend, kind of depending on the classes, but workload is about twenty hours a week outside of of my classes. So that involves studying or doing assignments or working on different labs within these statistical programs.

So part of the reason that I chose this program is because I did my undergrad in business administration here at the University of Utah at the David Eccles School of Business. And so being here and working with the faculty and seeing how the program was laid out, really made me feel good about pursuing the master's degree here as well. Because I think that they've done a really great job of structuring the programs and understanding how to incorporate business management side of things, and relating that to IT side of the business, and kind of preparing you for real world scenarios. And the faculty here is surely hands on and helpful and all of them have years and years of experience. That is really useful and help me in feeling prepared after this program to go out and search for any career that that I like to.