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Stephanie Orellana
VP, Service Delivery;
Director, Technology
Insights Solutions
NineSigma, Inc.
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As many college students discover upon graduation, their field of study may not become their profession.
Stephanie Orellana, VP of Service Delivery and Director of Technology Insights Solutions at NineSigma, learned this lesson early in her career while volunteering at a hospital emergency room around the time she finished her bachelor's degree in biology at MIT.
"While holding a light for a physician who was stitching up a patient's injured hand," she said, "I realized that while I had to get through the moment without failing the doctor or the patient, I never wanted to do it again! That left me in a bit of a quandary, but a wise professor gave me what, at the time, was revolutionary advice: I didn't have to make a decision right then about choosing one path for the rest of my life."
After working as a lab technician for several years, Stephanie eventually earned her PhD in physiology and pharmacology at the University of California San Diego. With a stint at the University of Washington, Seattle, as a post-doc and research faculty member, as well as time spent at Case Western Reserve University building her own research program, Stephanie eventually took a position at NineSigma after using her experiences up to that point to determine what she really enjoyed doing. When asked what her typical daily tasks at NineSigma are like, she said: "Juggling." Elaborating on her response she said that her greatest personal accomplishment as a result of her job was learning to be more comfortable with new people, which her role at NineSigma exposes her to on a regular basis.
"The research we've done has really validated my feeling that you have to get everyone speaking the same language to be effective at working together," she said. "The evolving digital world will give all of us access to a much broader and diverse community than we've ever had before, and understanding how to adapt or accommodate to others' ways of thinking and working will give us all greater opportunities to understand new concepts and to build new things."
Stephanie concluded our interview by offering some advice to young professionals coming up in her professional field: "No matter how neat, logical and sequential a path might appear, there is always something coming in from the side to modulate or disrupt a clean and straightforward story. So maintain an open mind, and remember that no one thing needs to define your career path and that life and careers evolve."
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