Siena Pizzano, CCRA

I would say I owe a lot of my success to my mom. She has been a vice president of a marketing company, and just watching her my whole life growing up, balancing being an executive as well as leading a house and being a mother, and being able to look like she could do it all - I think I owe a lot of my success to her. I've also had some amazing mentors throughout the way, through different mentorship programs or just different people in the industry, allowing me to ask questions and just kind of letting me have a shoulder to lean on for any advice or any help that I've needed. One mentor I speak to very frequently is Michelle Rau, who is a C-level executive of Claims at Liberty Mutual. I was connected with her through RISE, and she's been very beneficial to me. She actually is the one that nominated me for the 35 Under 35 award, so she's definitely helped my career path tremendously.

I would say, in the beginning when you're starting any job or any position, ask for shadowing opportunities to see where you like to be, and then ask as many questions as you can going forward. When you first start out, you want to make sure you have a deep understanding of what you're doing, and make sure you write down those answers you get. I think especially when you're starting, you can ask any question once, but you can't ask it again, so just make sure you're getting all your information, but then you're actually retaining it, and you're able to replicate and not make the same mistakes twice.

I would say try to network as much as possible and attend webinars and different events. When I first started out, there were so many organizations to join for either young people in the industry or specifically for women, and anyone that I have reached out to is more than willing to help and try to advance people and wanting to bring people up with them. There's no shortage of opportunities, and everyone is willing to help, and there are so many resources. I think it's just a matter of finding which one really resonates with you and kind of running with it.

My specific industry, catastrophe modeling, is a little bit niche, but there is a tremendous amount of growth, especially as we're having climate change and wildfires and different natural disasters being highlighted in the news much more frequently. They're putting a spotlight on that, and I think it's an untapped market with a lot of room for growth in terms of getting better models, and then that helps us either price accounts more or just gain more opportunity. A lot of people are making more data-driven decisions, and we have the tools and the resources to be able to do that. It is kind of a niche area - I did data science and didn't really know what I wanted to do with that, kind of fell into this insurance industry and into this catastrophe risk management world. The sky is the limit. I started as a senior analyst and recently just got promoted to a risk manager, so I've had tremendous opportunity, and it seems like there's no shortage of opportunity.

I would say probably loyalty and honesty. When working with people, you want to be able to trust them and know that they're doing good work, and you're able to trust them to do the task that you ask them to do. Just being able to have open, clear communication with either family or coworkers, and just being able to have a strong foundation with them.