According to Mikki Shull G.O. ’76, the key to a successful life is simple, but can sometimes be fairly difficult to achieve.

 

“You have to find balance, not just between work and life, but between your productive enterprises. You need to have a creative outlet.” For Mikki, her first exposure to the myriad means of expressing those creative outlets came during her time at Glen Oak. “Not only were we a little different, but we took pride in being a little different, a little quirky. I think it gave me a sense that there were so many different possibilities ahead, and the desire to try to find them.”

 

Those exploratory instincts came in handy when Mikki was admitted to Carnegie Mellon University to pursue production and technical theater. “In a school where so many of the people that I knew were serious engineers, I was sure that tech theater was what I wanted to do. But then I saw the potential for growth in their summer jobs, and I decided to make the switch. I ended up with a focus in Industrial Engineering, but I knew that I needed to find my balance, so I was also a disc jockey on Sunday nights. It helped me to sort of pull myself together in order to face the next week of serious study.”

 

Upon graduation, Mikki took what she describes as a circuitous route to her professional career as a management consultant. After starting as an industrial engineer at a steel company in Chicago, she knew she wanted to try something different. “I had seen the peak and I had seen the crash, and I wanted to transfer my skills to a white-collar environment. I ended up with a company that did digital marketing, and that was my first experience with internal consulting. I learned that I had a passion for people, process and technology, and that consulting was a way to strike that balance.” After relocating to New York, Mikki attended a job fair to try to find that next step in her growth.  “To be honest, the lines were very long for the openings to work at the banks, and the line for PricewaterhouseCoopers was very short. That’s one of the reasons that I ended up there.” And it ended up being where she would spend the next 12 years of her life, working with media and entertainment companies.

 

“I got to do all the things I loved, and I didn’t have to work in a bank or an insurance company! I got to balance the creative  with the work I loved to do.” After a long career, Mikki understands the value of curiosity.

 

“Never pass up an opportunity to discover and understand  and explore,” she says. “When you dig deep, and make an  effort to understand other people’s perspectives, you can  make a difference.”