Miranda Dal Zovo '10 G'16

“I think anyone who thinks a career path is a straight line, please disabuse yourself of that notion right now. Careers in anything are not a straight line. You may think you know what that looks like coming out of the gate, but you go into it and decide that, "Oh, this isn't a good fit," and I would say, "Don't be afraid to admit to yourself what isn't a good fit."

“I went into customer service, out of tech support, because I'm like, "How hard can it be?" I hated customer service. But from every role I said, ‘Okay, the next role, we want more of the things I like, less of the things I don't like,’ and just looking at it from that perspective.

“I moved into the utility industry, which I had no experience in prior. You can learn any industry as long as the skillset is cross-applicable. I will never be an electrical engineer. That's a skill set I just don't have. But I can support an electric engineering organization because the skillset they need from me is process improvement and performance management. They don't need an engineer from me. They need the skillset I have to drive their organization and make it better.

“I work in the utility industry. It's an industry on the cusp of sustainability, climate change, and factors from states and regulators that are forcing us to think about our role differently. To me, it was very applicable to go into entrepreneurship and innovation because of the changes that our industry is in the midst of.

“I am a performance consultant. I work in corporate performance management, and my role is to bridge strategy and data. I work with executives to develop their balanced scorecards, track key initiatives they're working on, and do data analytics. I bring the strategy from their level, down through their organization, and reiterate it in ways that are applicable to the folks that work for them.

“I had a lot of process improvement skills before taking on the master's degree and the role I have now. But that degree taught me to be constantly looking at the broader picture, looking at the vision, looking at the strategy of an organization. I had a lot of skills in connecting data, but that ability to take and connect strategy and innovation to it was something that, launching into my master's program and completing it, just deep dove and blew it out of the water.

“That piece is what lets me take an executive's vision and strategy, and connect it down to their managers, and supervisors, and analysts, and say, 'Here's the bridge between that strategy, at the 10,000-foot level, and what you're doing on the ground floor.' That's the connection I can build now, where before I was much closer to the ground. I might've come up to 1,000 feet, but I never hit that high point and connected it all the way through. My graduate degree definitely got me the role I have now in performance management.”—Miranda Dal Zovo '10, MBA Entrepreneurial Thinking & Innovative Practices G'16 #MyPath