Catching up with an MHEFI Scholarship Recipients: Catherine Ninah, University of Central Florida
Silicon Valley is the birthplace of many of the gadgets and technological breakthroughs that play central roles in modern life, but even the smartest of techies need to call in reinforcements from time to time, and that’s where Catherine Ninah comes in.
Based in Dallas, where she now lives, Ninah spends most of her time traveling and is a frequent visitor to Silicon Valley as a management consulting senior analyst with Accenture. Ninah, 24, specializes in advising clients in the communications, media and technology fields, helping them solve technology problems through process development, business requirement gathering, future-state roadmap design, operating models and strategic recommendations and assessments.
Ninah joined Accenture in August 2017 as a management consulting analyst, earned a promotion within a year and was named the company’s most innovative analyst in North America for the third quarter of 2018 due to her excellent project performance in Silicon Valley and her contributions to white papers covering supply chain strategies.
She recently began helping a high-tech client launch its new division in Japan and said she’s “super excited” about it since many of the core principles in industrial engineering and manufacturing case studies that she learned in college, including Lean Six Sigma, originated from Japan.
Ninah said that in college, she participated in interesting research projects and obtained a number of internships at prestigious companies, making it hard to choose between going for her doctorate and entering the business world, but in consulting, she found the best of both worlds.
“It’s fun. I like the fact that I get to travel and that at a young age, I get exposed to high-level business strategy at these tech companies,” she said. “I want to make an impact in technology, and I enjoy learning, and that’s what I enjoy about consulting. I have worked with different tech clients on different tech problems, but one thing that is the same is that they’re always innovating, and I’m always learning about new technologies.”