Elizabeth Molye

I graduated from law school in 2002, which was a really rough time for the economy. I had originally wanted to do immigration law, but it was right after September 11th, and there weren't really a lot of opportunities in immigration law, so I ended up working in litigation support and document review, which was not very interesting work to me. I then got a job as an analyst at a government contractor, SRA International, and worked there for a number of years. I didn't really feel like I was building a career and wanted something where I could grow, so when a job opened up in the contracts department, I thought that would be a great fit for me with my legal background. I applied for that job and got it, starting in January of 2008 as a contract administrator, and I've just been working my way up since then. When I came to the National Academy of Sciences in October 2014, I had to learn on the fly how to work with grants and cooperative agreements, which have a different set of rules than the government contracts I had worked with at SRA and CGI Federal. I relied on training through different organizations and my colleagues to help me learn. Now, as a Senior Contract Manager, I'm at a point in my career where I'm able to help train and bring up people who are starting in their careers, developing the next generation of contract professionals.