While it is important to deepen your technical skills, being a successful leader in a workplace often means being able to juggle the financial, technical, and logistical challenges of day-to-day operations. The courses I have taken as part of my Engineering Management degree have let me see how engineering is applied in a business setting. Pursuing a master’s degree with a thesis would have certainly deepened my technical skills. Yet, as someone interested in operations management roles, I felt a master’s thesis would have left me with a narrower skillset upon graduation and may have resulted in being underprepared for the variety of challenges manufacturing spaces encounter daily. An Engineering Management program, to me, represented a way to gain as broad an understanding of business and engineering as possible in order to become a leader by making meaningful contributions to an organization’s success.

 

The most important reason I chose Purdue University's Master of Engineering Management program, however, was for the co-op component. My hands-on rotations have allowed me to see the principles I learned in my Operations Management course in action on a daily basis. The co-op rotations have also helped me apply the lean manufacturing concepts I studied in my industrial engineering electives. My current co-op rotation is as a production supervisor at a manufacturing site. Performing this role would not have been possible without the prior coursework I completed as part of this program.

 

Looking back, the Engineering Management program at Purdue University has been a great fit for me. I could not have foreseen how much I have developed within my program in just a short amount of time. I fully believe this program has helped give me the proper foundation to merge the technical and managerial problem solving skills that make up a well-rounded leader.