Core Stories Set

Tell me about a time you...

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1. Showed leadership.
   
   Last year, I led a consulting project for a small St. Louis business that struggled to meet consumer demand. As the team lead, I managed client expectations, coordinated my team’s efforts, and delivered actionable recommendations to address the client’s challenges. To be successful as a team lead, I needed to communicate effectively and be adaptable.
   
   I organized weekly team meetings to align our objectives and track progress. I assigned tasks based on the individual strengths of my team members, encouraged collaboration, and ensured that each person contributed meaningfully. I maintained weekly communication with the client to gather feedback and ensure our proposed solutions were relevant and feasible to their business needs. I adapted our strategy based on their input to meet their needs when necessary.
   
   Our efforts paid off when the client implemented our recommendations, which resulted in a 25% increase in customer engagement. Observing the impact of our work was rewarding and helped me learn to lead my team to achieve results. This experience improved my leadership skills and increased my understanding of how to drive meaningful change through collaboration and data-driven decision-making
    

2. Took the Initiative to do something without being told.
   
   During my sophomore summer, I had the opportunity to intern at Dot Foods Inc. as a software engineering intern. While my manager was still deciding on an intern project with the rest of my team, I took the initiative to reach out to speak with various members of different departments. I wanted to understand not only what Dot Foods Inc. did from a holistic view but also the inner workings, such as how each team interacted with each other.
   
   One of my meetings was with a lean leader of the customer service department. She walked me through the process of how a customer service representative responds to calls. When I asked about how she navigated the IBM iSeries database, she responded, “With a lot of patience and effort. If only [the Dot Foods Inc. CEO] would allow them to use AI to pull order information, it would be a lot easier.” 
   
   A few days after my meeting with the customer service lean leader, I researched internal chatbots and pitched the idea to my manager, who loved it. Despite no one on the team having experience with creating a chatbot, my manager approved the project. By the end of my internship, I finished a functional prototype, which I presented to one of the executives to demonstrate the positive impact that AI can have on departments within Dot Foods Inc. 
   
   My experience at Dot Foods Inc. taught me the importance of taking the initiative and understanding the needs of a stakeholder in order to identify pain points. I learned the value of collaboration because I would not have been successful without the support that I received from my team, manager, and mentors. I also learned how to navigate ambiguity. Working with unfamiliar tools such as Microsoft Azure and natural learning processes helped to strengthen my technical skills and confidence in problem-solving.
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3. You solved a business problem.​
   
   Last summer, I interned at the Centene Management Corporation as a business systems analyst. For the first week or two, I spent my time learning the systems that Centene used and getting familiar with everyone on my team. For my intern project, I was tasked with looking into ways that my team could implement a software development philosophy called Agile into practice. My team currently employed a version of the Agile but did not completely follow the guidelines as thoroughly as my manager would have hoped. 
   
   After completing training modules on Agile and ITIL v4, I met with various team members to learn more about existing practices and goals for Agile methodology. I noticed that everyone agreed that our team could benefit from a more robust retrospective meeting. After discussing my findings with my manager with support from team survey data, she asked me to create a virtual board to track the progress of their retrospective meetings by creating an application within ServiceNow.
   
   Throughout the summer, I collaborated with stakeholders to gather requirements and iterated on the design based on user feedback. I developed various prototypes with variations, such as a manual survey for collecting data and creating a draft tracker. The application improved workflow tracking efficiency, providing better team performance and visibility of outcomes.
   
   Working on this intern project, I learned about the importance of defining clear and precise requirements. I learned how to design user-friendly tools to help drive continuous improvement by incorporating features like tagging, categorization, and access controls. This experience helped me gain a better understanding of how to use key performance indicators and regular review cycles.
    

4. You worked with data.
   
   During my junior year, I worked on a CEL Practicum project with SurgeryAI.com, a London-based HealthTech startup focused on improving operating room efficiency. Our goal was to support user discovery and use the information we gathered to define key features for their minimum viable product (MVP).
   
   I cleaned large datasets on surgery scheduling to ensure the data was accurate. I discovered various patterns and bottlenecks, such as underutilized time slots and delays due to scheduling conflicts, which put us in a better position to understand the true nature of operational inefficiencies that hospitals have to deal with. I complemented this with interviews with staff in some of the NHS hospitals in the UK and American hospitals using the same operating room management software. These conversations provided much value on existing practices, recurring challenges, and points where innovation can make a difference.
   
   I also completed competitor research on the HealthTech space for OR rooms, where I evaluated their features, market positioning, and value proposition. Combining insights from the data, hospital interviews, and competitor research, we identified a broad-based view of the market in which SurgeryAI could differentiate itself.
   
   My work contributed to actionable strategies aimed at improving operating room efficiency and putting the company in a position to stand out in the competitive HealthTech market. This taught me how to combine data analysis with qualitative research to develop meaningful solutions. This experience also deepened my appreciation for how market-driven decisions and firsthand conversations can uncover opportunities for real impact, especially in a complex field like healthcare.
   
    

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