Valerie Lopez

My background is in public health, and originally I wanted to become a public health dentist, but chemistry wasn't my calling. After graduating from East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tennessee, I came back to Memphis and needed to find work to sustain myself and make sure I didn't get my degree for nothing. I found a job working as a contact representative at ALSAC, St. Jude, and was promoted pretty quickly within the first couple of months to a team position. My last position there was as a liaison between the call center operations and IT, where I got introduced to business analysis and project management. I would gather requirements, work with IT and technical teams to understand what the end users would like to see, do the user acceptance testing, build out test cases and scenarios based on the subject matter, and invite subject matter experts to test. I thought I could pivot into business analysis and project management with the skills I had grown in that role. Today, I'm a project manager within Hilton Corporate in the Accounting and Finance Services Department. My team handles projects that are incoming from strategy as well as on-property finance that will advance hotel operations at the property level. My major project right now is a knowledge management project where I'm managing an Indian team that is creating documents and processes, anything that tells us how to get the work done on a daily basis in the Hilton corporate office. These documents have to be updated on a yearly basis, and I'm commanding that process. I completed my Master of Public Health from Liberty University in 2023 after starting the journey in 2015, taking a break when I found out I was pregnant, and then finishing what I started within a year of starting at Hilton.