the LGO journey

a little bit more about me

Where am I coming from?  Why did I choose LGO? Or more importantly, how did I convince MIT to accept me?  I won’t answer all these questions right now, but I will address these basic mysteries throughout the summer.  If you have any specific questions you want me to answer, please submit through the link on the right.

I figured I would start my story with a story about why I became to be interested in operations.

I have always wanted to know everything.  If I don’t know something, I want to learn it.  Lucky for me, wikipedia and google have streamlined this process for me and now can usually find out an answer pretty quickly.  As a freshman at UConn I knew I wanted to choose a major that was challenging, but I wanted something that I thought would also give me flexibility to figure out what I actually wanted to do.  Business and Engineering were both things that interested me, but I felt that just one or the other would bore me.  I wanted to learn more.  This led me to the dual degree program between the business and engineering schools, Management and Engineering for Manufacturing.  Not the sexiest major name, but I loved it.  Essentially, it was very similar to the LGO program, but at an undergrad level.  

After picking this, I was lucky enough to get an internship at Pratt & Whitney as only a freshman (thanks Dad) working in the engine leasing group.  It was the first time I heard terms like 5S, Continuous Improvement and Lean.  I did not really grasp the concept or truly appreciate these things until a few years later, but I thought it was cool that applying common sense to business processes could save time and money.  I led a project (sorry for resume speak) that saved thousands of dollars just by creating a visual control system for inventory of engine plugs that we kept in the office.  Additionally, I helped to create a standard universal contract to write the leases for each of our customers.  The changes I made seemed so obvious and I didn’t really understand why everyone did not see things like I did.  This is where my interest in operations began.

Being exposed to operations thinking in an office setting proved to me that things like lean and six sigma could be applied to literally any setting, business or environment.  In the complex world we now live in, the opportunities are bigger than ever.  Industries such as healthcare and even the government are starting to apply these principles.  Institutions are quickly finding that the opportunities are enormous.  This is incredibly exciting for me and I look forward to exploring a career in Operations.

3 July 2010 · Comments

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• operations