Start Up of Me
I started at SEAS almost 10 years ago. I always knew it was the right place for me, but I honestly couldn't have told you why it was perfect for me until just now. After school, I spent 5 years in retail sales operations. My work and mission was how to enable our sales team with better systems, insights, and accurate forecasts to motivate them to be the best sales organization it could be. After a few years, the tech bug caught up with me, and I recently joined a social media "start-up" in a similar capacity. As I thought about my next step, I thought about what my strengths and what separated me from the plethora of applicants to firms in Silicon Valley. After soul searching and conversations with various mentors, I realized my strength was exactly what Columbia Engineering touts: I'm an engineer with a liberal arts background. What does this mean? I can code, organize, and extract data and systems like any engineer. At the same time, I can gather qualitative feedback, distill key learnings, and creatively problem solve to resolve real business issues like any liberal arts student. I can take complex information, summarize important findings, and communicate it to influencers in the world. And in a world depending on technology evermore and that technology ever evolving the world, more of society will need to be able to bridge the gap between basic engineers and sales people; engineers and business people; and ever more importantly, between engineers and technology users. I cannot think of a better program that prepares its students for that world.