Preparing to start my career after completing my degree has been the focus of my entire undergraduate career. This has been prevalent through the many different directions my education has gone over the past four years.
I initially came to the University of Illinois to study Chemical Engineering, which was influenced primarily by the fact that the university was a top engineering school and that entry level chemical engineers see some of the highest initial income's for recent graduates. Second semester, I took a class where we met with professionals in the field to paint a better picture of what chemical engineers do in the real world. Unfortunately, after listening to a new presentation each week, I began to realize that engineering really wasn't my passion. The last straw was a presentation from an engineer who had gotten his MBA and come back in more of a business/managerial position. Inspired by the kind of work he did, I met with him after class to seek advice on how I could experience a similar dynamic and type of work. His advice was simple, drop engineering. He told me that while it is a great field, if it is not the actual work you care about, you won't advance in your career, and that many engineer's salaries flat line after several years of work. This was a very quick lesson in the value of future dollars, that although I may not start out at as high of a level, the plateau in salary would not occur until much later and at a higher level. After this conversation, I began to rethink my career choices and reorient my goals to reflect the value of entering a field with a great potential for growth.
Almost on the contrary, I switched into Political Science, as I was always interested in it and reasoned that a liberal arts degree, when leveraged properly, would help me to grow my career later in life. The summer between my freshman and sophomore year, I got my first job as a telemarketer for the University, which was at first just for some extra cash, but of which the value would be seen later. Additionally, I was always told how critical it was to have at least two well established internships during my undergraduate career. Looking for an internship the summer between my Sophomore and Junior year, I came to the quick realization that there are few recruiters who would continue to read my resume after reading "B.A. Political Science". I was lucky in that I was able to leverage my telemarketing experience into an internship at a small healthcare consulting firm. That internship, little did I know, would spark a passion for healthcare management, an industry with relatively high barriers to entry. I learned about project management, developed my business acumen, interacted with clients, and worked on my professional data analysis skills. Despite having one internship under my belt and finally finding a field I cared about, I soon realized that I incurred the same problem. At the fall career fair my Junior year, I saw the eyes of countless recruiters glaze over as they realized I was only studying political science. I completely struck out, and decided that if I was going to get a job, I needed to add a greater value to my degree by adding something quantitative, which is what led me to Economics. I picked up my second major in Economics shortly after, and come the Spring career fair, the story was very different. Recruiters were interested in me for my economics background and I was able to leverage that and my past internship to get another internship for the summer between my Junior and Senior year. This new role, was essentially a technology liason that involved me interacting with the client and the database that managed their information. While this was completely outside my wheel-house, I developed my query writing and problem solving skills. Now as a senior, all of these experiences have culminated to a competitive full time offer at a healthcare consulting firm. Through the interview process, they viewed my educational and technology experience along as the necessary prerequisites to join on as an entry level consultant in the Revenue Cycle Transformation division. For some perspective, this division uses multiple dimensions of data, generally claims related to find non-labor reduction ways of improving reimbursment rates or saving money for the system. Essentially, restructuring clinical sequences so that profit may be maximized without diminishing the quality of care.This position is not only in a field that I am passionate about but it is also well paid and in a competitive work environment. I see a lot of potential for growth now that I anticipate joining, and as such have been able to reflect on how my decisions helped to mitigate my income risk.
First, I chose to study something that I cared about in addition to adding a major that I knew would get me a job. While it would be ideal to only study one or the other, at the end of the day I knew that the purpose of getting my college degree was to get a job, and in order to do so I had to have a diverse education that provided me with both quantitative and qualitative problem solving skills. Additionally, I also tried to develop my business skills very early in my academic career. Although I didn't realize it at the time, progressive work experience and internships through college allow your future employer to trust that you will be a successful employee and that you will perform in a business setting. Most importantly, however, I found that I secured my income risk by developing my "personal brand". I never thought that I would advertise my self as an "analytics" guy, but my economics degree and internship in the tech role branded me the label unintentionally. Analytic problem solving skills are easily trusted, in that the formal education and the experience one receives is a measurable indicator of that person's ability to apply those skills in a professional setting. Since this skill is easily trusted, it meant that I had opened the doors to more opportunities since seemingly now every position has some "analytics" dimension to it. I evolved my brand from a Political Science student looking to take on complex problems in the business world, to "a soon to be graduate in Political Science and Economics that uses his analytical problem solving background and passion to healthcare to innovate data-driven solutions in the changing climate of healthcare".
Keeping my eyes to the future now, I chose to accept the offer at the consulting firm because I knew that it would only further develop my analytic skills and healthcare practice knowledge, without pigeon-holing me to a particular division within healthcare (clinical documentation, electronic health records, etc.). Since Revenue Cycle has a wide breadth of potential projects, this will set me up to develop a larger range of experiences and hopefully one day allow me to enter a managerial position at a higher salary because of my breadth of experience. While it also serves me well that this position pays the best of the other offers I have received, I know that had it not I still most likely would have taken it because of the opportunities for growth that it would provide me later in life and the ability to secure a higher income as my career grows.
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