It makes me tingle to say "I work for Mayo Clinic." My father was diagnosed with cancer and to see the number of talented individuals that came around my father's illness, to help in the operation, to help do his treatments, to help with the information, it was amazing ... we are in the business of saving lives.

My days are spent in a combination of meetings, phone calls and emails. About a third of my time is in meetings; another third of my time is either spent consulting with colleagues, looking at web references, or building computer analytical models; the last third is spent communicating with customers or connecting the dots on related projects or emailing and talking on the phone. A typical day generally includes three things: 1) a customer comes with a problem to be solved; 2) we analytically figure out the problem by either drawing a model or building some analytical tool, such as a report or a website; 3) we go back to the customer and work together to implement the plan and meet expectations.

I love meeting with the customer and hearing about the different issues and scenarios. I love solving the customers' problems and taking on the challenge of finding solutions not previously thought of. All of our interactions are with and through other people. To succeed in this position, you have to like talking about people's issues and have an interest in the analytics and mathematics behind the issues. You need to be a bit curious about how to think about a situation, and then you need to be able to enjoy putting that into numbers to look for an answer. The best analysts are also able to communicate in a manner that people can understand. A desire to be a life-long learner is important as well -- as a system analyst, you are always in a new situation, learning about a new set of problems, learning about a new group of customers, and then learning new ways to solve those problems.

As an analyst you need know math and mathematical principles to solve problems. To me, it is exciting to see problems that few people understand and then use math principles to develop solutions -- the same math principles taught in high school. At the time you wonder why you need to know that stuff, but now I use those skills daily in my job as an analyst.