Jessica Andrews

Jessica Andrews works someplace in the vicinity of Seattle. But that's about as specific as it gets – in her job as Senior Financial Analyst for a successful real estate investor who shall remain anonymous, she's asked to do just about anything, anywhere.

“Preparing financial statements, estate planning, financial education for his kids…” she says, “You name it.” That's pretty impressive, and certainly uses a great deal of what she learned in school (and then some), but wait, *teaching the boss’s kids* about money? That's not in the standard job description for a Financial Analyst. Isn’t that supposed to just include things like optimizing portfolios and securities, streamlining financial reporting, modeling different investment decisions and making recommendations based on your employer’s financial goals?

“Well, I wear a lot of hats in what I do now,” Jessica says. “In addition to the trust work, asset transfers, appraisals, analysis and other financial stuff, a piece of what I do is preparing these kids to be business owners.” That's great, especially given that they'll likely grow up to inherit substantial sums of money – not to mention some of Dad's business projects if they choose. Still, Jessica, how do you even know how to do that? Your Master's is in Professional Accounting, not Education.

“I've always enjoyed helping people learn about money,” she says. “I've actually started a business on the side, teaching teens and kids about everything from the basics of banking to liquidity and diversification.”* Right. So she's well qualified, but there's still the question of how Jessica ended up in this job in the first place. How is it that she's one of the go-to people for a whole financial empire? Sure she’s handy with weighted averages, statistics and analysis of variance – that comes with the territory. But how can she, as she did a couple months ago, get handed a stack of financial statements, be asked to have them “cleaned up and fixed,” even though all the projects they pertain to are new to her, and still get it taken care of in a timely manner?

“I've grown into the position,” she says. “There's no way I could have done all this five years ago.” Besides, she does get a little help when needed. She gets to hire specialists to assist her from time to time, and is responsible for reviewing her team’s work. Plus her boss has experts of all types on his team, and Jessica has access to all of them. “He'll tell me, 'If you have questions, you call the lawyers,'“ she says. “And I definitely take him up on that.” She refers back to her study books from the CPA exam too, to fill in extra blanks.

So even though her academic career was pretty successful – she was the only student who served on the university's Accounting Board, and was named “Best in Class” by The Wall Street Journal – her post-collegiate career has been even more astounding.

“I didn't know a career in accounting could lead you to a job like this,” says Jessica. “It's all on the job training, which has been really cool.” Her boss is happy to have such a multi-talented problem solver helping keep his affairs in order, too. He recently told her he “couldn’t imagine how this could have worked better.” Jessica’s already working on it, no doubt.

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