Life has constantly put me in situations out of my comfort zone. I was born in Colombia, and my parents moved our family to NY when I was 15. I was brought to a new Country with a different language and overall culture. It was challenging in the beginning, attending a small school where I was the only Hispanic person in my grade, learning a new language, and everything involved in high school. The following year, I began volunteering at the local aquarium to explore career opportunities and enrich my communication skills.
I was thrilled to have been accepted into three different universities before my high school graduation. I chose to attend The State University of NY at Stony Brook, where I continued my career exploration by taking Marine Science, Aquatics, Sociology, and basic sciences classes. During my Junior year, I had the opportunity to meet with the director of the Respiratory Care Program. After meeting with him, I was confident that this was the best next step in my career path since it aligned with my passion for helping my community and complimented my caring personality.
As a respiratory therapist, I worked with all kinds of patients, from newborns to ninety-year-olds, at all levels of illness. During this time, I sharpened my critical thinking skills and my ability to work under pressure since just one mistake can cost someone their life. After working a few years in critical care and emergency departments, I started to see a need to educate patients on their disease and rehabilitation processes and translate from technical language to something they could understand. I developed an uncontrollable need to question the department processes with the desire to improve hospital and patient outcomes.
I have never liked the saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” As a life learner, I have always questioned everything, most of the time to understand it better and/or to improve it. My aunt loves to tell a story about me related to this. I was 2 or 3 years old, and I loved to play with wooden blocks and spread them all over our living room. One day my aunt was babysitting me, and she had picked up all the blocks and put them away. When I realized my blocks were not on the floor, I asked my aunt where my blocks were. She said, “It is late, and the blocks went to sleep.” I asked her, “Do the blocks have eyes?” and she answered, “No, they do not.” I asked, “Do they have a nose?” and she replied, “No, they don’t.” I asked her, “Do they have a mouth?” and she responded again, “No, they don’t.” Then my last question was, “If the blocks don’t have eyes, a nose, or a mouth, how could they be asleep?”. Then she proceeded to give me the blocks. My curious personality has carried, and the department director saw this in me. He offered me a position where I would focus on patient education, employee training, and department process improvement.
In 2017 I became a patient and compliance analyst. Patient education was easy; I had the ability to create stories about their body and disease process in a way that was interesting, captivating, and easy for each patient to understand. Here the challenge was to learn administrative procedures, use available technologies, and create a process that met the patient and department needs. During my investigation and the beginning stages of this project, I realized that meeting current needs was not enough. I needed to create a program that also provided a way to quantify status, have a visual representation of changes, and have the ability to set goals. I had to orchestrate and collaborate with four different entities. It took months to get everyone on the same page, and the program was created and running. We saw a significant improvement in patient satisfaction, patient compliance, increased department efficiency, and standard of care. Looking back at how much I had accomplished and how excited I was through the process, I knew I had found a love for data and technologies to help humanity.
In 2019 my husband was offered his dream job in Texas. This was the perfect opportunity to start fresh and think of what I was interested in and where I wanted my career to go. I started studying for the GRE and GMAT exams, exploring career opportunities, and taking different online courses while working at a local orthopedic hospital on a performance improvement project to reduce pneumonia-related admissions after surgery.
In 2020, I was accepted to the MS Business Analytics cohort Data Science program at The University of Texas at Dallas. This program has been my greatest life challenge, even harder than moving to a new country. Learning new languages, technologies, and career cultures outside the clinical field was overwhelming initially. As I was soaking it all in and started to feel more comfortable in my studies, I became a foster parent, and shortly after, I found out I was expecting my first child. Challenge on top of a challenge; I would not have had it any other way. I had to learn that sometimes the most important and wonderful things in life are unexpected, so I moved from full-time to part-time.
During the summer of 2022, I worked as a human capital analyst intern in the people analytics and technology team at Lockheed Martin Aeronautics. I had the most wonderful time; my opinions and work were valued at different levels within the organization. Ultimately, my experience at LM validated my career choice. I improved many soft and hard skills and created lifelong relationships with leaders and colleagues. Today I continue my learning experience as a student, professional, and new parent.
