One Data Analyst's Career, Then & Now
By Rachel Organist
This week at Workman Forensics we’re talking about how the fraud investigation and forensic accounting industries have evolved over time. I’ve been given an opportunity here on the blog to talk about my own career evolution, which has had its own share of dramatic shifts!
As a lifelong bookworm with a love of learning, I started my higher education journey confident in my decision to pursue majors in English and secondary education. Reading and writing were my “thing.” I didn’t consider myself a quantitative thinker, and although I was a Hermione Granger-level nerd who was generally successful in all of my classes, I always described science as my worst subject. It didn’t take long for my first geology class, taken to fulfill a lab science requirement, to make me question this identity I had created for myself. I began to see that data could tell stories, too--sometimes more effectively than words.
With the encouragement of my geology professor, I took another class in the department, and then another. Before long, I had demoted my English major to a minor, dropped the education studies, and was officially pursuing a geology degree. Through a summer research job mapping and doing structural interpretation in the Lake Mead area, I first experienced the excitement of the scientific process--formulating an interesting question, identifying the data needed to answer it, then going out and getting it. I applied to master’s programs and planned a career in academic geology.
Although I enjoyed my graduate school experience, I began to realize that the lack of direct, real-world application of my particular research topic--using something called low-temperature thermochronology to investigate the tectonic history of northern California--left me feeling less than satisfied. As my thesis defense approached, I dropped my plan to continue on towards a PhD and started to look for jobs instead. Unsure of what I wanted to do with my geology education, I interviewed with several oil and gas companies and eventually accepted an offer to move to Oklahoma and join a mid-size exploration company. The interviewer, who would become my first supervisor, impressed me with his understanding that “data is data,” and his confidence that the problem-solving and analytical skills I had learned in grad school would be applicable to my work as a petroleum geologist even if I didn’t have direct experience with wireline logging or drilling wells. This would become a theme in my future career explorations.
If I ever get too far “in the weeds” and forget the basics of using data analytics in investigations, my handy Post-it note is here to remind me.
Over the next four years, I was fortunate to learn a ton about petroleum geology, working with everything from core to production records, from wireline logs to geochemical data and more. Although the specifics were new to me, the underlying process was the same one I had followed as I investigated the tectonics of the Klamath Mountains for my master’s thesis, and that I had first gotten a taste of in southern Nevada back in my college research days: formulate the question, break it down into smaller questions if needed, identify the data needed to answer those questions, and analyze the data to find your answer.
As oil prices remained low in early 2016, my employer announced the closure of our Tulsa office. I was given the opportunity to follow my job to our Houston-area headquarters, but from extensive work travel I knew the area wasn’t for me. I’m a Minnesota native and my husband is from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, so I had secretly been looking for a way out of the industry for years--I enjoyed the work, but hoped to one day have the option of moving closer to our families, which wasn’t likely to happen if I was tied to oil and gas. The office closure was the push I needed to explore other careers.
I first landed at a professional organization for geologists, helping to coordinate the technical talks presented at conferences. Although I snuck in opportunities for data analysis where I could, I quickly realized that the role entailed too much interpersonal work and didn’t have enough of a quantitative component to be a great fit for me. My search started anew, and just like when I was job searching back in grad school, I began to think about ways I could apply my skills outside of the specific fields I had experience in.
That process led me to the data analyst role at Workman Forensics. It probably sounded like a strange next step to other people, but it’s been a perfect fit in many ways. Through my scientific education and experience, I already understood the investigator’s mindset and the need for careful documentation. I’m still looking for patterns in data to answer questions--it’s just that the data is financial instead of subsurface. I love that the faster pace and variety of client work keeps things interesting; instead of working the same oil and gas play for a year or more, I now see new client cases every month, each with its unique surprises and challenges.
I hope my career story is helpful to others who are interested in forensic accounting or data analysis, or are just wondering whether they can apply the skills they already have to a new field. If you have specific questions, drop them in the comments or reach out on LinkedIn. This story is far from over--as I work on solving new problems here at Workman, I look forward to seeing what the next step in my career evolution will bring!