Tina Shah, MBA, PMP

My journey as a strategist, business operations consultant and leader had modest beginnings. At the age of 12, I designed, sourced production, marketed and then ultimately sold my own line of ethnic apparel. In high school, while maintaining a solid 4.3, I continued to work after school selling vinyl siding, tax shelter annuities, and pizzas (not at the same time). In college, I helped develop a pharmaceutical purifying process patent during an engineering co-op with Hoechst Celanese. I was also the College of Engineering's representative for the University of Texas student government with a student body of over 60,000 students and a multimillion dollar budget. As a young engineer at Motorola, I created change and moved up to project management quickly. From those early days of leadership, I found and have cultivated my true passion - creating and nurturing teams to perform at their highest potential. In my 20- year career thus far, I have created, led, and managed operations, strategy, and analytical client/consulting teams. For the past decade, I have been a small business owner and been in the C-level leadership for a small consulting company. What do you learn in those environments? You are entirely accountable for everything. The buck stops with you and there is no hiding behind an org structure. The improvements to bottom line come with planning and a strong execution team. Personally, I am a strong advocate for increased STEM education for young women specifically. Because I found there to be a need, I designed, created and staffed my own program called Ms. STEM. Summer 2014, we held our first summer camp and due to popularity of it, we are now growing it gradually to something bigger! My professional and personal motto are one in the same: work hard, be honest, treat people with respect, and even under pressure, there is always room for grace and a smile.