I am an MIS Specialist for the FIRST5 of Santa Clara County. My job is to manage data of families and their children based on demographics and provide reports to management so they can make decisions on where to allocate resources. We fund non-profits who provide direct services to families; for example, there is a service called the Health Mobile that goes around and helps kids get dental care. Outside of my day job, I work on music; I work on different projects that need music like the music for a film that is being played at the Sacramento Film Festival and Univision.

EDUCATION | BS in Management Information Systems and I also went to vocational school for music and audio engineering.

HOW TO GET STARTED | One main advice that I would give is to learn what your customer wants and needs and figure out a way to provide it to them because sometimes them telling you what they want or need won't always be helpful. Being able to listen and figuring customer needs will always bring success.

MUST HAVE TRAITS | Besides being a good listener, you must have good communication skills

how I got started | I was always into technology and music so throughout high school, my hobbies were computers and music. I was fixing computers and was competent with using it to accomplish different tasks like graphic designing and creating reports. I had experience programming because I had programmed websites and machines at a sheet metal shop that I worked at in high school. I wasn't planning on going on to college because I wanted to work on music right away and I was already recording and producing my own music and selling it out of my backpack and car. My parents convinced me to go to college where I initially was going to become a Marketing major, but I found out about MIS and thought it was more practice for myself. I did a lot of small internships like running a website for the San Jose Spiders, which is a women's basketball team, and at a recording studio as a Marketer and Audio Engineer intern. I joined different organizations in college such as Alpha Kappa Omega where I was the secretary and webmaster; I started applying what I learned in college and created websites, databases, and templates for the fraternity to use for events. I found FIRST5 through Craigslist and applied for it because at the time, my experience fit the job qualifications. I had an internship at NUMMI beforehand where I had to heavily manage parts and data on a regular basis, which helped a lot.

why this job?| This specific job is easy for me, yet hard for others. With all of my experiences, I can apply it to my work. I like to create things so whenever I have an opportunity for someone to tell me that their system isn't working or that the data doesn't make sense, I fix it and/or make sense out of the data. If I could choose one thing to do, I would work on my music, but my main focus is my day job because it pays more than the music and entertainment for now. I have some projects that I am hoping to do because I have my own music publishing company.

why I love this job!| I love my coworkers and what we are working for. I like how what I am doing can help make a huge impact on my community. Also, I like the fact that I can work on things on a project by project basis and to just maintain things.

my typical day| My day starts at 8:30A.M. And I check in with my coworkers to see if they need help with excel worksheets or anything to do with the databases. I work on the different projects that are assigned to me and I continue to maintain the reports that I made. I sometimes go to meetings where we review what we have been doing. One of the projects I am taking lead in is creating a new database to manage our documents and work flow; I recruited some San Jose State students to work on the project and we have a weekly meeting to check on how that is progressing. My typical day ends at 5P.M.

what they are | The biggest challenge is trying to get the upper management to see things or find the importance in something that I see. I usually get commands from management to get things done but I can see certain things can be improved and they don't see it. To get the support to make a change is slow. I guess patience can be considered as a challenge.

all about growth | From working at FIRST5, I learned a lot about the County of Santa Clara and how things are ran with government agencies and non-profits. If I get an opportunity in entertainment, I still want to be involved with the community; I can't be a musician forever. I would like to become involved in politics and local/state governments in the future. For right now with my music, I am going to have two albums that will be releasing this year. I am very excited for this because one of the albums, I am working with a guy who has experience marketing for big names such as 50 cent and LL Cool J.

my website| http://www.getassociated.net