Tell us about yourself! What’s something that the OPAIR team doesn’t know about you?
Outside of work, you can find me playing guitar and drums, hiking with my dog Nellie, mountain biking, and volunteering. In the last year, I have been working on perfecting my sourdough bread recipe and learning how to make different variations of sourdough.
What does your professional history look like? What led you to working for Penn State?
I previously worked in healthcare IT for a few local healthcare systems. I started as an electronic health record programmer analyst, worked as an interface engineer, and then found my “professional calling” working with data and analytics.
I am an alum of Penn State and wanted to give back to the university. I had heard many great things about working for Penn State and being from the local area, it felt like a great next step for me. The important work that is done by OPAIR and the university attracted me to work in higher education.
Describe what a week looks like as a Business Intelligence Specialist.
Most of my week involves troubleshooting matters behind the scenes but also involves helping users work through their technical issues. Building data models and dashboard analysis is another big part of the Business Intelligence Specialist role. Recently, my role has been centered around the iTwo update, which brought many new learning experiences and let me bring together some previous experiences that I have for creative solutions that keep me thinking and growing.
Are there any projects you have tackled this summer you are particularly proud of?
The iTwo update from OBIEE to OAC was particularly a high point of accomplishment for me and the Data Modeling team. There were many moving parts that needed to be completed and some items that needed to be created just by us to help ease the transition for not only the users, but also the administrators. A particular accomplishment that I worked on was integrating the current Security Manager system with Azure Active Directory. I created a PowerShell script that can be called when a security database table is updated, and it syncs the data to the appropriate Azure Active Directory groups without manual intervention. This was a challenge, as there are a fairly large number of security groups and many changes that occur quickly regarding security. System updates and changes can be daunting, but this update went smoother than I could have imagined.
What are some of your personal and professional goals for the new school year?
I want to expand my knowledge within OAC to give the users of iTwo the best experience that we can offer. Another big goal of mine is to increase my knowledge of Power BI, as well as get back into learning Python. Overall I want to increase my capabilities to deliver data and insights through our tools at OPAIR.
Outside of OPAIR, I would like to travel a bit more in the next year. I want to check off another National Park on my list, hopefully Glacier. I also want to ride my mountain bike in one of the popular biking locations in North America, places like Pisgah National Forest and Squamish are at the top of my list—I have a soft spot for being out in nature and want to get outside as much as I can!