The first summer after undergrad, a friend and I decided to change the brakes and rotors on my car. Short on cash, but long on time to scour YouTube, we set out to “figure it out”. It took a few hours longer than it needed to, but we eventually got the job done. You can imagine the terror I felt when I realized that the new brakes didn’t work. The car rolled out of the garage, down the driveway, and into a (thankfully empty) school parking lot across the street with no resistance from the brakes. It turned out we had forgotten to pump the brakes to restore the hydraulic fluid throughout the system. Once that was done, the brakes worked perfectly. With this hurdle out of the way, we offered our “services” to close friends for the rest of the summer.I’ve learned to be much more cautious about checking my work in the intervening years, but this short story conveys my greatest strength as a team member: I attack challenges head-on. I am incredibly comfortable with “figuring it out”, quick to learn new skills, and have never stopped pursuing opportunities to do so. This voracious approach to challenge fueled me as a science teacher to develop new curricula, pilot professional learning communities, and lead several sports programs. Ultimately, it emboldened me to leave teaching altogether to pursue a master’s degree.My mechanic-for-hire days are long gone, but this overarching attitude has carried me through my career since graduating from UChicago. In my new adventure I have helped companies develop analytics insights into all facets of their businesses