Financial analyst by day

So I seem to have developed myself an "About Me" slogan. You can find it on Facebook, or Twitter, or on this here blog.  

"Financial analyst by day, blogger by night. And Jesus freak 24/7." 
Sums me up pretty darn well.  

I've blogged a little bit here and there about my job, but mainly just about how it found me. I thought today I'd go into a little more detail on what exactly this "financial analyst" side of me does. 9 hours a day. 4-5 days a week. 

(If you're confused on that schedule, check out this post)

Growing up, I always wanted to be a teacher. Ever since elementary school, all the way up through the middle of college, that was the plan. In elementary school, I wanted to teach elementary school. In middle school, I wanted to teach middle school English. And in high school, I wanted to teach high school math. 

English was always my thing. I wrote poems, stories, scripts, journals, everything. My mom had been a math major (at UCSB, too!), and for that reason, she always kept me working on my math skills. Even as I was glued to the Diary of Anne Frank in middle school and getting a deficiency notice in pre-algebra (yupp, that happened), she pushed me in math. 

And thank goodness she did, because when it clicked, it clicked. I'm a stubborn wanna-be perfectionist, and when they opened up the honors algebra II/trigonometry class to anyone who wanted to try it, I jumped on board. Even when my counselors advised against it, I pushed through. And lo' and behold, I fell in love with math. Took 2 years of calculus before graduating high school, and bam. My dreams of becoming an English teacher turned into dreams of becoming a math teacher. 

Fast forward to the middle of college when my path changed. To keep this post from becoming an essay (already well on its way), I'll skip the minor details, and just say that I developed an interest in business. Corporate America was flirting with me, and I was definitely interested. 

And as you probably know, I've been in Corporate America ever since graduating in March of 2011. Here I am, on job #2, and still loving it. Will I be here forever? No clue. I'll be here for as long as God wants it.

So what does a financial analyst do? Well, I would imagine that we are all slightly different. Depending on the company, and depending on your particular focus. I work for a large engineering company. There are different branches of finance within our company, and my particular team is called the Financial Planning & Analysis team, or FP&A.

Our team's job is to analyze and keep track of the financial metrics for our division of the company. What are financial metrics? Bookings, sales, profit and cash. My focus is bookings, which I find super interesting because it's all of the future business that we are hoping to bring in. 

Being in a large, public, corporate company, we are given goals for the amount of dollars we must bring in with these various metrics each year. It is my job to help make sure that we meet those goals, and I am extremely privileged to work on a team with incredibly intelligent and successful men and women that make that possible.  

So now that you have an idea of what I do, I thought I would see if you have any questions! Could be about work, could be about getting a job after college, could be about what to do in college to prepare yourself for the workplace. I know a lot of you guys are either in college, or young professionals like meee. So if you have any questions, feel free to throw em' out there. 

Happy Humpday!