However, she was really looking for a career that provided more travel opportunities and a more dynamic social environment. So after graduation, when the engineering firm closed the plant where she worked, Howarth chose to move with friends to London. She didn’t have a job lined up or even a place to live, but she saw the move as a means of pushing herself.
“It’s important, if you have the opportunity, to do something different and push out of your comfort zone,” Howarth says. “It helps you realize you’re quite strong and can do so much more than you thought.”
From learning the business to insuring its future
While in the U.K., Howarth began her insurance career as a risk analyst for a broking house. It wasn’t the career path she’d expected: “If you’d told me then that I’d end up in insurance or reinsurance, I would have been surprised. I thought I’d be a biomedical engineer someday.”
After moving to San Francisco for a broker position, the one-two punch of hurricanes Katrina and Rita hitting the U.S. led to the next step in her career path. She saw an opportunity in Bermuda to be an underwriter and moved to the island to take it.