An interdisciplinary path, built from the ground up.

Overview

This page is the coherent version of the story, not the credential dump. The important part is not just where I've worked. It's how the pieces connect. Operations taught me scale, constraints, and execution. Economics taught me incentives and value. Security and risk analysis taught me how systems fail and how uncertainty moves through them. Finance sharpened some of that further, but the real pattern is interdisciplinary.

That's also why the path matters to me personally. I worked first, then built the academic base deliberately while continuing to work. It was never about collecting titles. It was about building a stronger lens, one broad enough to move across domains without losing analytical rigor.

UPS

UPS was the real operating base. I started on the frontline and moved through supervision, dispatch, control room work, automation, and operations management. It was the first place I saw what scale really looks like. Throughput, route efficiency, labor allocation, equipment constraints, service pressure, volume surges. You learn very quickly that systems are fragile, that bottlenecks spread, and that most decisions show up somewhere else downstream.

That environment taught me something I still carry with me: operations are economic outcomes in motion. Asset utilization, capacity planning, process design, and execution discipline are not separate from value creation. They are part of it. Long before I was building valuation models, I was already learning how the underlying machinery works.

Apple and School

After the pandemic, I made a conscious tradeoff. I stepped back to part-time work at Apple so I could become the first in my family to earn a college degree. That decision mattered. It gave me the room to finish the A.S. in Business Administration, then the B.S. in Economics with Security and Risk Analysis at Penn State, while still working in a place that sharpened a very different set of muscles.

Apple taught me service, technical communication, client trust, and how to translate complexity into something useful for another person. Economics had already fascinated me since high school. Markets, early trade, perceived value, rationality and irrationality, the strange mix of science and art underneath it all. The risk analysis work added the other lens: how systems fail, how threats propagate, how uncertainty gets quantified. That combination turned out to be far more useful than either one alone.

Interdiscipline

The point, to me, is to create value. For yourself, for the people around you, and ideally in a way that compounds beyond you. That belief is what keeps pulling me across domains instead of into one narrow lane. Economics, risk, operations, strategy, and finance all answer different parts of the same question. How do systems work, where do they break, what incentives are shaping them, and where is value actually being created or destroyed?

The Master of Finance at Penn State Smeal and the strategic finance work at Referrizer have sharpened that picture. The work runs on two sides. One side is the analysis: valuation models, growth assumptions, scenario testing, investor conversations, and shaping the financing story around the business. The other side is what makes the analysis usable at speed: the investor prospecting system I built for the raise, InvestorBook, and LeadDoggy. The disciplines stopped being separate a while ago. Finance tells me what to build. Building is how I move faster than the people who only do one or the other.

Credential Dump