I always found it difficultto separate business and technology,so I decided to pursue both.

I was a kid who loved computers before I loved much else.

Robotics camp, opening up the file structure of the games I played just to see how they worked, shutting off my siblings’ computers as a prank.

I built websites for fun. Excel conditionals were puzzles to me, budgeting formulas I played with long before I understood what they were actually for.

None of it felt like a skill. It just felt like something I did.

It never occurred to me that any of it could be a real profession. I didn’t know any better.

When it was time to pick a university, all I knew is I wanted some distance from where I grew up.

The major was simpler. My family was all business, so I started in finance and accounting.

Three internships followed.

I didn’t find my passion in telecommunications at Charter, but writing SQL and VBA was so intriguing to me, and it made my workflow so much more efficient.

A summer internship at Ernst & Young within Wealth and Asset Management, rotating between tax and audit, was next. On the side, I got interested in blockchain and distributed ledgers, and how ledger-based systems were starting to change the way accounting itself was tracked.

I took a computer science class to fill a leftover science requirement, and learned Python for the first time. It changed everything.

I was fortunate enough to land EY’s full time busy season accounting co-op, one of five selected at my school, done in parallel with a full course load. That’s where I built the macros that automated work usually done by hand, and it sealed it, technology was what I actually wanted to do.

By graduation, almost all of the free credits I’d stacked toward the 150 required to sit for the CPA were in computer science, not accounting.

I did the math on the 2,000 supervised hours standing between me and that license, and decided to go straight into technology instead.

I finished with a double major, accounting paired with information systems and a concentration in AI, graduating with honors.

After graduating, I joined Deloitte’s digital consulting practice, moving across industries as often as I moved across tech stacks.

My first project: an e-commerce build for a large real estate home builder, working between the business side and the dev team.

I felt like I could bridge the business and the technology better if I actually understood how the software got built, not just how it got described. That curiosity led me to teach myself modern front end development.

Wanting to go even deeper into the engineering weeds is what pulled me into data engineering next, Python, PySpark, building pipelines.

I mapped the full patient experience for one of the largest pharmacy chains in the country, from outreach to outcomes, to see the whole picture instead of one slice of it.

From there, I built an end to end data pipeline for margin analysis, work that strengthened our positioning with the client and led to a contract extension. Even as the engineer building the pipeline, I was still the one presenting it to the client, the same instinct from day one hadn’t gone anywhere.

Then came a full software engineering role: a full-stack platform for a large health insurer, moving personal health data securely into their systems, using Java. I built the entire frontend myself and handled backend components as well, presenting the work directly to the client throughout. The extension that followed came with an ask: lead the team this time, not just build for it.

Same pattern every time: the deeper the technical work got, the faster I was pulled toward managing the people doing it.

Now, I’m at A&M, within Valuation Services, a multi-billion dollar practice.

Manager and senior software engineer, and a founding engineer on the firm’s Valuation Platform.

A presentation in front of the entire practice led to being selected to help run AI strategy, and I helped stand up the Valuation Services Innovation team from the ground up.

The kid who used to take apart file structures for fun is now doing exactly that, professionally, for a job that didn’t have a name yet when I started. Business and technology were never separate. I just kept going deeper into one until it turned into a view of the other. Depth turned into height, every time.