I grew up in Boise, Idaho. I was fortunate to grow up with loving parents and siblings, and able to have a really great high school education, where really the classes that I was most interested in were business focused, specifically economics. That sort of prompted my exploration into into business. In high school, I was also able to do a bit of travelling with a human rights organization. We visit Japan and Jordan and when I was there. Really what was fascinating to me was the passion people had for their businesses. Realizing that their creativity, their passion, their experiences are their life, every day in the small business and the business that they run. That's a very common career path for those countries, and these were new experiences for me. So it was really interesting to me to see that sort of lifestyle and it kind of got me inspired. So, I translated that to the university of Utah right. I studied finance and from there I didn't really know what type of business I wanted to get into. I'm still not sure I do, but it was really a great framework for me to kind of discover what route I wanted to take. Specifically the business scholars program kind of helped me narrow my interest and get a taste of of all different disciplines of business that the school had to offer. So finance kind of clicked, I like numbers, I like statistics and I like analysis and so command those three, four things I mentioned. I found finance to be a good fit for me and, I've been fortunate to have very few incidents or extreme challenges that I've had to overcome to get to where I am. So I'm very aware and cautious of that to be thankful for where I've gotten and really to stay humble as I move forward, understanding that I have had many privileges and haven't had to overcome some of the obstacles that I know other students and other young professionals have in their careers.

The pre-sales, so our team kind of bridges the gap between sales and product and data. So we're technical experts in the investment accounting space with both our product and industry. And so some of my day to day responsibilities are doing request for proposals. So when a a prospect is interested in purchasing our software. In our service, we have to typically fill out these questionnaires talking all about what Clearwater does so I spend quite a bit of time on that. We also run our demo environment. So i am cleaning accounts, prepping accounts for salespeople and other pre-sales members to demo to prospects and clients to make sure that we accurately reflect the capabilities of our products. So I help own that process. And then, also, we're starting more initiatives with market research and the investment accounting space, really trying to focus our target on what we want to sell too, rather than just take right broad blanket approach. We're trying to narrow that focus, and so i'm beginning to work on some of the data behind that and to start coming up with a few reports and suggestions, for each market that we work in which are insurance, corporate and investment management.

All of our software that we use are proprietary, so we have a lot of internal tools that just can't can't be learned outside of working in Clearwater. And so, some of those are what I've really tried to deep dive on because I have to be a technical expert of our products. I'm trying to become more familiar with this plethora of tools that we use internally, but external tools that we have, that i have touched on, a couple of web based applications as well as I'm trying to get better at SQL. We have an enormous database that we access, and we have many different layers to it. And so I'm trying to learn how to navigate SQL, and I haven't had any experience with that prior to beginning my work here. So it's been a bit of a challenge so far. But I think learning that framework, that base programming knowledge would be super helpful and very transferable. I do prefer external tools to internal. Our internal tools are very powerful, but they're also very complex. And for me, I like external tools in which I can say, OK, if I learned this, this is what I can do with it. So SQL is an interesting one for me. I'm hoping to dive in to R a little bit more, as I do market research. Statistical programming, I think, would be very helpful for that. So that's kind of what I have my sights and on next, as well as starting to define my skills with SQL.