Elliot Oshman, BBA 2000
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Senior Consultant, Hitachi Consulting
Using your experiences in high school to help decide your major in college is no easy task. Many high school students never get a chance to work in a part-time job to try out a field of business. With an initial interest in accounting, Elliot got that chance and spent six weeks as an intern in the Tax and Audit groups at Ernst & Young. Six weeks was long enough to send him back to the drawing board.
Elliot entered McCombs School of Business not sure of what he wanted to do, but knew he had enjoyed playing around with computers growing up and helping family and friends with hardware issues. Once in college, he took MIS 325: Database Design and Implementation and discovered a potential major. "The combination of the school work and the professors and people...I just continued from there. Every class I took I enjoyed more and more," he said. By sophomore year, Elliot declared MIS as his major.
When it came time for on-campus recruiting during senior year, Elliot attended a career fair and found that a mutual friend was working for a small firm called Tactica Technology Group (since acquired by Hitachi Consulting). He heard great things and knew that he didn’t want to join a large consulting firm. The VP from Tactica brought a lot of energy to the fair and had done his homework—already talking to MIS professors about potential students. Elliot was one of those students, and he credits good relationships with faculty and quality classroom teaching to prepare him for his career. Although Elliot interviewed at several other small Texas firms, he chose Tactica for its cutting edge technology, Java programming projects and great people.
Elliot is now in a transition point in his career. For the past five years, he has programmed, worked on all levels of the software development life cycle (SDLC) and helped with high-level functional design. He is now in a mostly management role with the occasional “return to the code.” Elliot is on the path to becoming a technical manager, “somebody who can deal with the client and difficult scope conversations, deadlines, and also lead a team by knowing where each of them are in their timelines and help when they need it.” He enjoys the chance to solve problems using information technology, complete projects on time and develop and mentor others in their careers.
What advice does Elliot have for current MIS majors? (1) MIS is not just coding, but it can be if you want to. It helps to understand how to write programs even if that is not what you want to do for a living. (2) MIS at UT teaches you how to think and use technology to benefit the company you work for...the specific technology you learn is unimportant. (3) Teamwork is VERY important in any MIS job you will get out of college. You must be able to work in a team to succeed. He has met MIS majors from other universities and notices that although they know technology, they often get stuck when faced with solving business problems. He feels that McCombs teaches its graduates how to think. If hiring for his team, Elliot would look for people who can interact well with others, project professionalism, and take a complex issue and create a plan to solve it.
When he isn’t at work creating solutions for clients or developing his team in Colorado, Elliot stays involved with the Texas Exes (translation: goes to every football event), and enjoys skiing and golfing with friends. He also finds time to reinvest some energy into Hitachi Consulting for non-project work, such as developing case studies and helping with business development.
