My journey since leaving Loreto College, St Stephen’s Green

I didn’t have any idea what I wanted ‘to be when I grew up’ and so picking a course for college was tricky. I didn’t have the vocational pull of being a doctor, or lawyer, or teacher so I decided to just focus on what I was interested in. Biology was always my favourite subject in school, and I also really liked Chemistry, so thought choosing a Science degree was a good option. I did Science in Trinity, specializing in Microbiology, but then had again no idea what I wanted to do afterwards. It seemed the only two tracks out of Science were either to do a PhD (which I definitely didn’t want to do) or else go into Pharma. So, after doing a 6-month ski season in Meribel (highly recommended! It’s also where I met my now-husband, which is insane!) I did a brief stint in a pharmaceutical company, which I hated. Met again with the existential crisis of ‘what the hell am I going to do with my life?!’ I started to look at general business-focused jobs to give myself the option of something outside of science. I was looking at jobs in consulting companies and came across one which was for a ‘Life Sciences Innovation’ role which ideally wanted someone with exposure to pharma, and so I applied. Little did I know that it was for the new, not-yet-opened, Global Innovation Hub of one of the biggest companies in the world. So, it was kind of an accident that I ended up here and I’ve been here ever since.

My current roles, most and least interesting parts

I am an Innovation Lead, or a project lead who manages multi-disciplinary teams of designers, technical engineers and AI experts to identify new technical solutions and build them to sell to all our clients. We do this across lots of different industries and so I’ve worked on projects in Life Sciences, Customer Service, Probation Services etc. It is such an interesting role because of the people I get to work with and the different industries. Every day I’m working with people who all think so differently. The designers think about how users will engage with tools and what are the ways that we should consider designing them, while the tech team is teaching me how things actually work, especially as we utilize GenAI and other AI technologies. I’ve also gotten to travel to so many cool places with work like New York, Chicago, California, India and Sydney! I’m very fortunate that very little of my work is boring but I suppose creating certain PowerPoint presentations can be pretty dull.

Favourite memory from Loreto College

My years in Loreto were great, we really loved to just get involved and make the most of things. We particularly loved any opportunity to do fancy dress (as how can you have a normal school day when you’re in an extravagant costume). When we were in 6th year it was coming up to International Women’s Day, not a normal dress-up occasion, and so we begged the principal to let us dress-up. Our entire year came into school dressed up as famous women, so we had the likes of Mother Teresa, Jackie-O, Spice Girls and Princess Diana. My friend dressed up in her mum’s wedding dress and we found some old netting to create a 15-metre veil which she wore around school for the whole day. I have so many funny stories from school but I don’t think the rest will get past the vetting ! P.S. Ms O’Reilly is one of my friends so you can ask her!

The teacher who most influenced me

Ms Campbell- Biology was my favourite subject, and she was so great at teaching it in a fun and engaging way

Career advice for current leaving cert students

Very, very few people know what they want to do as a career, and you shouldn’t, because I am still only learning how many jobs ‘exist’ from being in the working world. Don’t stress yourself out thinking a course should define your future. Very few courses leave you fully prepared for a job anyway, you learn it as you go, so just focus on doing something you find interesting. I never would have thought that my job existed, let alone what I should have done in college to get here. Doing a science degree just showed employers that I’m smart, can problem solve, can look at data… they don’t care that I’m particularly good at doing it when it’s about Microbiology!

Skills I think will be most important in the future work environment

When I interview people the main things I’m looking for are that they can work well with people, they take initiative, they can problem-solve and are keen to learn. You can demonstrate this across so many things whether it's school, college projects or any kind of job.

The one thing I would love to come back to the school and do is

Just sitting in the common room with all my friends, beside the jukebox, gossiping and laughing. We all still talk about how great it was that we got to do that together 5 days a week.

Plans for the next few years

I’m really happy where I am work-wise right now, so I’ll continue to climb the ladder here until I get sick of it. My role has changed so much since I arrived, but it means I’m constantly learning which is great.