 Often the problems that get brought to us are things that haven't been tackled before, so there's no ready-made solution that you just pull out of your toolkit of solutions. What did you want to do as a career when you were my age? Oh my goodness. You take a winding path and it gives you opportunities to learn and grow and meet new people. I've always liked the idea of being a consultant because to me it's kind of like being the architect of the business world, if you will. We're trusted with very complex, often highly sensitive challenges where there are real-world implications and real-world outcomes that need to be delivered. It sounds easy, but it's not. My name is Karina Adderbu. I am currently studying a Bachelor of Finance and a Bachelor of Psychology here at the ANU and in the future I want to go into Corporate Consultancy. My name is Taiana O'Donnell. I'm a partner at Deloitte and I lead the Climate and Sustainability Practice here in Canberra and I'm also an Associate Professor, Affiliate with the Fenners School here at the ANU. So today I'll be interviewing my future self as someone who's done a science degree and then gone into consultancy. At a dinner party, how do you explain what you do? Great question. So as a partner in a management consulting firm, I describe what we do as really two-pronged. One is and the priority would be that we solve really complex problems for our clients. They come to us when they need that help and they usually need those solutions quite quickly so we need to be able to scale and have the energy to do that. So we solve problems, complex problems and we build multidisciplinary teams around those complex problems. What did you want to do as a career when you were my age? Oh my goodness. So I always had aspirations to be a lawyer and indeed I started my career in private practice as a solicitor in environment and planning law. But by the time I had got to your age and I'm just guessing what your age is here, I had already started to have an inkling that I wanted to do more than just understand the black letter of the law and apply it to solutions for people who needed that advice. And so I went back and did a PhD in climate change adaptation and that enabled me to really build out an offering that had lots of technical capability but also breadth in terms of the kinds of issues and challenges and opportunities I could see on the horizon for our society and so that's what I did. But I didn't know at that time that I was going to end up being a partner at Deloitte. What do you look back on as a key turning point in your career? I think there's been a few. I think the biggest turning point or one of the biggest turning points was the 2019-2020 Black Summer Fires and the recognition during and after that that the need to scale, rapidly scale in response to the climate crisis and the climate emergency and to bring the best of all sectors and the best minds and the best perspectives to that issue being how we mitigate and adapt to climate change gave me pause and gave me time to think about where the best place for me to be and so it was a long thought process but I made the decision to go back into private practice and join Deloitte as a partner to be able to do that and it was the right decision. How do you think the scientific thinking that comes from being in climate science and all those degrees, especially a PhD, how do you think that thinking has informed how you approach not only problems but how you craft your own solutions? It's a great question. There are pros and cons with the PhD training. One of the cons would be in a PhD and in my academic work there was always a lot more time to work through the theory and the theoretical underpinnings of what I was talking about. There isn't always that time in consulting. That said, without question my PhD in terms of the topic but also the training have really set me up well for the role I have now and probably the main thing I would call out in that, almost several, I'll call that two. The first one would be how to manage complex projects and I think the other one is being able to really step back and unpack a problem from multiple perspectives and understand it from those multiple perspectives. That's a really important skill that I think the sciences and the social sciences in particular really harness and curate in students as you're going through university and something to be proud of and something to really emphasise when you're out in the world looking for different career pathways. So to round out our conversation today, I wondered if you could share your thoughts and imaginings on where you see management consulting going over the next 10, 20, 30 years and by the time you're the future self being interviewed, what that might look like as a career option? Well for me, management consulting has always been something I want to go into as I do really see consultants as the architect of the business world. So in that the same way an architect walks through a city and points out buildings they've worked on and they can talk about the details. To me it's attractive to go into a business like that, be able to contribute to businesses and solve complex problems as you talked about and solve them in unique and adaptive ways. Yeah, great. Thank you, it's been a great chat.