Patricia Dyce- French

The best career advice I ever received was from my colleague at JetBlue, who explained to me one day that you need to be able to explain your work. From an accounting perspective, that changed my entire view, because a lot of times people open your work and they say, well, why did you do this? Or how did you come up with this? Being able to explain that neatly and articulate exactly what you need to has been just as important as getting the work done on time. With that being said, it's actually caused me to start using colors in my Excel sheets. I know why I did this based off this color, this flow, or whatever the case may be. So when I roll back something from two years ago, I can say, well, I got the numbers based off this flow. It's kind of like a little refresher to me. So basically, being able to talk about your work, even if it's dated, is very important.

I would say first, remember that your professors are your future employers. Always try to maintain great relationships with your professors. Second, don't be too emotional about work. It's just work. So whenever your direct report manager critiques your work, they're not speaking to Patricia as a person, they're critiquing the work that you did. Receive criticism with open arms, because as bad as the criticism may be, it will teach you things that you need to address. The last thing I would give to young women is, whenever you're entering into a meeting, meeting people for interviews, or even your regular weekly meetings, always take notes. We take notes vigorously in college, but somehow when we're into the profession, we don't always take notes because we think that we can remember everything. Sometimes it's those little details of the notes that you took that you're able to make something sharper at a later date. Even with stuff that can be recorded, if you make note of the time that a certain topic is being touched, you don't have to listen to the entire recording - you can go right to 3 minutes, 23 seconds. Sometimes it takes being that detail-oriented, but it makes your life easier in the future.

Always being present is most important to me. I realized that when I was going through a lot of tough times in my personal life, it would spill into work. This is kind of mixed with maturity and just growing pains of having to deal with tough times from a personal perspective and then still going to work. I can say now that when you show up, no matter what's going on at home, when you show up at work and you say I need to perform and you're present, you're able to kind of clock out of all your issues that you're having at home and really tap into your work. You do way better when you're present - not just a person in a seat, not just a person in a cubicle, not just a person just crunching numbers, but present, mentally, you're tapped in. Going over into my personal life, even being a mom, I want to make sure that I'm not just parenting with just the standard touches. I want to be present, so that means if she needs to wake up a little later Wednesday versus Thursday, we can accommodate that. I have that type of relationship with my daughter, so I'm like, oh, can I not go to before school? And she knows I work from home on Friday, so I can accommodate that. Being present, being in touch, understanding the need and demand and where you need to be, and just being present is just so important to me.