Canfield BHP alum Gloria Chan Packer, Founder and Principal Advisor of Recalibrate reminds us all that it’s okay to step back, take a deep breath, and get a healthy dose of perspective before recalibrating to tackle our day, especially you go-getters! Recalibrate is a global workplace mental wellness provider, based in Austin, focused on delivering uniquely science-backed education and easy-to-implement tools for busy professionals. We caught up with Gloria to talk about her entrepreneurial journey in the mental wellness space and along the way, discussed what inspired her.

After graduating in 2011 with her degree in Canfield BHP and Finance, Gloria maintained an impressive career in management consulting over eight years at Sense Corp. where she focused on technology strategy and implementation projects across all industries as a Senior Engagement Manager. Then in late 2017, Gloria started struggling with chronic migraines—a malady she didn’t have a problem with before. 

Gloria explained that “they got very bad very quickly, where I was getting weekly migraines that turned into every other day that turned into every day over just a few short months. At the onset, I was trying to figure it out and take care of myself while also trying to very much power through and white-knuckle my way through, but it took those migraines getting really bad for me to force myself to slow down and re-examine my own relationship with stress”, she said.

This was the moment in her career that Gloria realized her body was forcing her to slow down. During that time, she learned more about her relationship with stress and the science behind mental wellness, which is where the concept of Recalibrate began. Continue reading

It is not every day that we have the opportunity to hear from an alum who has made some incredible impacts on social justice. To be honest, we definitely love hearing from them when we do! We recently caught up with Canfield BHP alum, Ashley Williams, who has gone from a financial professional to policy analyst fighting for social justice at Every Texan (formerly known as Center for Public Policy Priorities). Ashley demonstrates how to use your analytical skills to serve your fellow human.

A triple-major, Ashley graduated in 2016 with degrees in Canfield Business Honors, Finance, and African and African Diaspora Studies. After graduating, she ventured into the energy space at ExxonMobil as a Financial Analyst. Later, Ashley went on to pursue her Master of Social Science degree at UCLA. Following her masters, Ashley joined Every Texan which, at the time, was known as the Center for Public Policy Priorities where she now serves as a Policy Analyst in the organization’s Economic Opportunity Team.

“Every Texan is a policy advocacy organization. Our mantra is that social justice requires public policy. That is what I do — I work on the Economic Opportunity Team, particularly as a higher education state policy analyst to work to put forth and analyze policy that drives equity and access in higher education, particularly for students from historically underrepresented backgrounds. I absolutely love my job.” Continue reading

Canfield BHP alum, Maya Josiam, graduated in May 2018 with her degree in Finance. After graduating, Maya started working in Dallas as a management consultant at Oliver Wyman, where she focused on cases across a variety of industries ranging from manufacturing and financial services to education. It was there in the education space that Maya further fueled her passion for education. Nowadays, Maya is a middle school math teacher and full-time student pursuing her master’s degree. We caught up with Maya to hear more about her transition.

 “I was actually at Oliver Wyman for almost two years. I started in 2018 and left at the end of June, this past year, to start a master’s program in teaching at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education. Currently, while enrolled in that full-time master’s program, I am also an apprentice teacher, which is just fancy talk for being a student-teacher at a Philadelphia middle school, where I teach sixth grade math and science.”

What helped to inspire you to make the pivot to education and become a teacher?

The education practice at Oliver Wyman really does a lot of different things across education, all the way from pre-K through college and even things like professional education and vocational education. I had done a lot of work and a ton of different projects across the education space in my second year. 

The pivot to education, for me, has been a long time coming. Even when I was at UT, I spent a lot of time working in the UTeach Outreach program, which is an awesome education program that UT has on campus. All of my internship experience was in the education space, and I knew long term that I wanted to work in education. After doing two years of consulting, and after a year of that time being in the education space, it felt like the right time to make a career transition into a more direct form of education, which for me, was teaching. I knew if I wanted to do anything in the larger education space outside of consulting, I needed to be a teacher first. The way I decided to pursue becoming a teacher was getting certified through a master’s degree program where I would also have the ability to teach in a real classroom. Continue reading