DescriptionWith the completion of Run I at the Large Hadron Collider, the primary directive of the high energy phenomenology community now lies in evaluating the lessons learned in order to formulate an optimal strategy for potential discoveries in Run II. Given the challenges to our theoretical biases presented by Run I, we argue for an approach to Run II that makes minimal assumptions about what new physics may lie at the electroweak scale outside of what has already been discovered. The overwhelming evidence for a Standard Model-like Higgs boson with a mass of approximately 125 GeV is undoubtedly of central importance for our considerations. The first section of this dissertation focuses on developing a model independent strategy for parameterizing theories of new physics by the possible decay topologies of heavy new particle states. Connections between this parameterization and theories like supersymmetry are also detailed. The second section focuses on exploring the newly discovered Higgs sector for possible non-Standard Model-like behavior. This includes the search for additional Higgs doublets as well signs of potential flavor violation induced by the Higgs sector. The final section is dedicated to new methods for extracting theoretical parameters from decay topologies that arise in a wide range of possible theories of physics beyond the Standard Model.