As I write this I'm getting ready to move from the San Francisco area to Los Angeles to start what's shaping up to be a great adventure at UCLA over the next few years. It's funny as a northern Californian I never really pictured myself living in Southern California but I've fallen in love with UCLA so LA here I come!!!!!!
Before the LA adventure starts I figured I should introduce myself. I'm a Berkeley, CA native but I spent most of the last ten years elsewhere. I went to school in Upstate New York at RPI, when I graduated in 2003 I moved to the New York City area to become a management consultant first with American Management Systems (now CGI) and later with IBM. I consulted to financial service firms, at AMS in a technical role, at IBM in organizational change and regulatory compliance roles. I loved consulting both for the work and also because it allowed me to feed my love of travel, I did client work in New York, Boston, Washington D.C., Tokyo, Hong Kong, London, Gabon, Vietnam and Laos. The more exotic work locations came out of a consulting engagement I had with one of the worlds biggest environmental NGO's that ran in parallel with my financial service roles over a four year period.
Consulting provided all sorts of amazing professional opportunities, it also opened the door to a really amazing personal opportunity. Through all my work travel I built up a lot of airline miles which made it possible to pursue my life long dream of taking an around the world trip. Last year I turned in a little over 200,000 miles for an around the world plane ticket and traveled through twenty countries.
I came back from the trip and launched into the school hunt which is a little more complex for me because I'm hoping to get a JD/MBA. I knew I wanted to attend a west coast school, first and foremost because after ten years away from home I was ready to come back and secondly because I wanted schools with a strong focus on entrepreneurship and social ventures.
I moved back to California last summer and started looking at schools. I actually didn't initially look at the southern California schools but I eventually decided to take a trip down to LA to check out the schools. During my first visit to UCLA I absolutely fell in love with Anderson, the campus culture just clicked, I really liked the interaction between the students and faculty in a class I sat in on, UCLA has great entrepreneurship and social venture programs and I really liked the area around the UCLA campus.
With my heart and mind set on attending UCLA I applied and got into Anderson, the law school side of my JD/MBA is a little complex so I'll get into that during a later post. Once I had the application process behind me I decided to learn more about what it's like to work at a social venture so I took a volunteer role with Kiva.org in San Francisco, CA for six months prior to school. I had an amazing time at Kiva and learned a ton, I'm now wrapping things up in the Bay Area and preparing to move down to Los Angeles. I'm really looking forward to my time at UCLA, I'll be posting again soon as school gets going in the coming weeks.
