Her Story
About Briana
Originally I thought I was gonna go into academia. I really loved chemistry in college and high school and everything. I went as far up that track as I could before I realized the joy is just not there anymore, and so then I started looking for something else. I graduated from college with a double major in chemistry and biology, was accepted to Vanderbilt University in a quantitative chemical biology program, and after the first year, I just was struggling to figure out why it just felt like it was so boring. My heart wasn't in it anymore. I got a kind of a transition role working as a research assistant in a lab where I was still doing academic work, running experiments for a circadian rhythm lab, but then I was also doing administrative work for the lab as well, between procurement, maintenance, and personnel kind of management for the lab. That's what kind of sparked me, and so then I just started looking for opportunities to build that aspect of my resume and portfolio. After that, I went through a really data entry heavy job that wasn't a good fit, so I moved on and ended up doing something that was a little bit more blended with the scientific backgrounds and administrative goals, where I was basically the office manager for a really small office in Maine and helped with some of the very technical aspect of the work there. It was an environmental protection agency vendor. They did air testing for these giant smokestacks, manufacturing plants. So they had all of this gear to maintain up to very specific codes. There was a lot of technical things to learn in that role, but also just making sure that they didn't have to do all of the paperwork that they were so bored with after getting into these harnesses to climb hundreds of feet into the air. From there is whenever I started at Veritas, my current role, Executive Assistant. They did the thing that most employers do, where they just keep giving you things. They keep giving you tasks, and as long as you keep continue to complete them, they give you more and more and more until you kind of plateau.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Briana
01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
For executive support, I would encourage young women that executives are just people, and sometimes it feels like you're herding cats, but if you find the right fit for a work environment, there's really nothing that you can't do. If you've never done it before, if you don't know how to do it, there is nothing that you can't do with just a little bit of brain power. Don't be afraid to try. For HR, I would say that one of the hot topics is having a seat at the table, having influence. That's something that just takes a lot of interpersonal skills. Always build other people up, because if you are the encourager, then people will enjoy hearing what you have to say, even whenever it becomes something that is a little bit harder to hear.
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