Month: November 2021

Chicago Woman Comes to MEM to Launch her Future in Wearable Design

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Alexa Boden ChinatownChicagoThe University of Connecticut being a state university doesn’t stop students from coming from around the world or across the country. Alexa Boden, currently a junior in Management and Engineering for Manufacturing came to UConn from Chicago, Illinois and brought her own goals and ideals with her.

“I moved to Chicago in eighth grade and lived in Singapore before then,” Boden said. “My parents and family are from the northeast, so I spent a lot of summers over here and knew I wanted to go to college somewhere on the east coast.”

While Boden considered both University of Connecticut and University of Rhode Island, she knew UConn would be her home as soon as she learned about the MEM program.

“I have always been interested in business and engineering,” she said. “I like problem solving. I like design, but I like thinking about the consumer too.”

Initially she was considering an engineering undergraduate degree and a one year master’s degree in business following that, but when she discovered she could get an undergraduate degree that combined both business and engineering at once, she felt it was the perfect fit.

Spring Break her senior year in high school, she toured UConn and paid her deposit the next day.

“It was maybe a little spur of the moment,” she said, “but it felt like the right decision. I wasn’t stressed about college applications, which is not my normal personality, but I had good grades, test scores and a bunch of activities. I just knew there wasn’t a bad choice because I was interested in both programs.”

Boden says she is fortunate that even though she is far from family, she has close relatives not too far away. She also keeps in touch with her family with FaceTime and says she is fortunate her parents book her plane tickets to come home a few times a year.

“I know I am going to see them in a few weeks which is great,” Boden said.

Boden said her parents also grew up in the northeast, so she was familiar with the culture here already and that it felt familiar, like home.

“I really like the northeast. It is really pretty and the states are smaller so you can travel around, take trips into New York City, take trains or drive other places. It is just much more convenient,” Boden continued. “I will probably stay in the East Coast to work, if I stay in the U.S., but ideally I would like to get a job internationally – probably something related to design, specifically wearable design.”

Boden said she is looking forward to a career related to design, specifically wearable design, and focus on sustainability and how the design interacts with the wearer. She explained this could mean anything from a prosthetic, diabetes technology or an apple watch.

“I enjoy the people aspect of creating something. I want to understand who is using it, what they are using it for, what the company goals are,” she said. “As a young person I want to think about designs that are useful and aren’t going to harm our planet even more.”

She explained that in high school she had the chance to take engineering classes and she did her capstone course with Project Lead the Way. “There was a girl who was born with only part of one of her arms. It stopped at her elbow, but she wanted to play the recorder so she needed both hands. We wanted to design a prosthetic for her that would help her achieve her goal, but also would be something she was proud to wear,” Boden said. “We made these adaptable pieces that connected to a bracelet. She was a little girl and wouldn’t want to wear something boring and gray, so we gave her pink and purple and sparkles and her favorite dog.”

MEM and OPIM Partner on Supply Chain Case Competition

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Supply Chain Competition UConn

Last month, Management and Engineering for Manufacturing and Operations and Information Management partnered with Unilever to bring students a Supply Chain Case Competition. Eleven teams of three students each competed to develop a plan to resolve a mock supply chain issue for Unilever’s brand Lipton and their green tea product.

Students were given a challenge with some background information, and two weeks to develop a comprehensive plan to solve the problem. In this case, the problem was procuring an organic green tea from a new supplier in Vietnam as the first organic green tea in the Lipton product range, and operating in line with the company’s guiding principles of safety, quality and operating efficiency. Students were also given Unilever company values of improving health and well-being, reducing environmental impact, and enhancing livelihoods, as well as references to the company’s sustainable living goals. The plans they suggested had to factor in these sometimes competing goals as they prepared and presented their strategy. Data on supply chain and sourcing, green tea facts, as well as product consumption and demand were also given to the teams to take into consideration.

Teams made their presentations in front of a panel of judges including faculty from the School of Business, the School of Engineering, and Unilever supply chain representatives. After their presentations, the judges were able to ask them questions to further clarify and challenge the students’ ideas.

Luca Mastrogiacomo, junior and a Management Engineering for Manufacturing major, says he really appreciated the opportunity to see how supply chain problems look in real world settings. “It showed why supply chain is important because of how interconnected it is with all areas of a business and how a supplier relationship is so much more than just transactional,” he said. “It was very fulfilling to me to be able to actually apply what I’ve been learning in class to a real business problem.”

The case competition served as part of the Supply Chain Management course taught by Dr. Craig Calvert. Students in the supply chain course were required to participate and provide a report following it for the class, while additional students joined from other engineering and business school majors because they were eager to showcase their critical business skills and win coveted scholarships associated with the first, second and third place winning teams.

The breadth of majors found among team members was also beneficial. Students said they found extra value in working with other students on a team beyond their own major. “It was fun because I was able to do it with some of my friends from the supply chain class,” said Paige Lombardi, Management and Engineering for Manufacturing senior, “…since Chloe is an MIS major and Liz and I are MEM majors, we were able to see how the two different majors interpreted the case differently. The case study was beneficial to me because it allowed me to use the knowledge from my internship experience as well as what I have learned in my supply chain class with Professor Calvert this semester and apply it to a real-world case study.”

Top Three Teams

  • First place was awarded to Team Blue, a team consisting of Cara Tran, Biomedical Engineering senior; Prabhas KC, Economics senior; and Alexander Kim, Finance senior.
  • Second place was award to team Supply Chain Reign including Elizabeth Downey, MEM senior; Paige Lombardi, MEM senior; and Chloe Sainsbury, MIS senior.
  • Third place was awarded to Andrew Warshavsky, MIS senior; Luca Mastrogiacomo, MEM senior; and Jacob Patterson, MEM senior.

 

Tech High School Grads Should Consider MEM

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Jonathan Varga MEM Junior, Jonathan Varga, joined MEM the spring of his sophomore year after entering UConn as an ACES student; however, he always knew he would choose Management and Engineering for Manufacturing (MEM) as his major. Graduating valedictorian of his high school, Harvard H. Ellis Technical High School in Danielson, Connecticut, Varga knew he wanted to work in manufacturing and used the unique opportunity that technical high school provided him to prepare him for a degree program.

While at Ellis Tech, Varga studied Precision Machining Technology and gained critical manufacturing machining experience while still a high school student.

The Precision Machining Technology track at Ellis Technical High School prepares students for immediate employment, earning industry credentials and preparing students for entry into the workforce, apprenticeship programs or admission into a two- or four-year college. Students take academic courses as well as career and technical courses in rotating cycles. As a result, Varga gained an enormous amount of hands-on technical experience that most other high school students do not have.

At Ellis Tech students have the opportunity to start working in a manufacturing precision matching role while still in high school. When Varga was 16, he began his experience in manufacturing at Westminster Tool in Plainfield, Connecticut. There, he learned the ropes of the industry while he was in 10th grade at Ellis Tech.

In this role at Westminster Tool, he worked with a mentor and had the opportunity to express interest in learning new things, work with engineers and machinists, and gain more practical manufacturing experience. Varga started as a CNC machinist and got experience in the toolmaking, molding, and engineering departments, while learning more about many machining and manufacturing processes.

Even though he knew he wanted to pursue manufacturing as a career, and was prepared to enter the workforce right out of high school, he was confident that he wanted to go to college. When he graduated top of his class he was offered scholarships at several universities, including University of Connecticut. In the end, UConn’s MEM program, with the unique opportunity to learn both the business and engineering side of manufacturing made it an easy choice for him to attend UConn.

While UConn and MEM don’t see too many graduates from technical high schools, it is clear that students from manufacturing and machining technical programs are well prepared and capable of succeeding in an Engineering program like MEM.

Dr. Craig Calvert, assistant professor in residence in Operations and Information Management, and co-director of the Management and Engineering for Manufacturing program sees this as a positive opportunity for Connecticut manufacturing.

“It is exciting to see that there are dedicated programs like this at the lower educational levels,” Calvert said. “It exposes kids to opportunities that they might not have in a traditional education. Connecticut has a strong manufacturing base with United Technologies and General Dynamics along with all the small businesses that support these larger corporations. Jon is positioned to succeed at any of these and make a big impact upon graduation.”

Varga explains that some courses were very familiar to him, such as Introduction to Manufacturing Systems and the related lab, “I came in ahead of the game in processes,” he said. “Courses like MEM 2211 and 2212 were easy for me since I already had so much experience working with CNC and plastic injection molding. However, I am still challenged in other courses, in topics that require a lot of technical writing or advanced math.”

Varga still works for Westminster Tool while he is an excellent performing student at UConn. He has built a good working relationship with the management there and really enjoys the work. “In the future I plan to stay in the manufacturing industry, in the medical or defense sectors. The level of challenging work in those fields really interests me.”

Varga says he would love to see more technical high school students consider degrees in Engineering or majors like MEM. “A lot of technical high school graduates don’t really think about getting a 4-year degree after graduating, because they don’t see how valuable their existing skills can be when transferred to a degree, but with a program like MEM your technical skills and management ability can really be taken to the next level.”

Management and Engineering for Manufacturing is a four year undergraduate degree program at the University of Connecticut. It is a joint degree between the School of Business and the School of Engineering. MEM students take courses to meet criteria in both schools, developing management skills and engineering skills for today’s technical industries. MEM graduates work in fields such as design engineering, manufacturing engineering, continuous improvement engineering, quality control engineering, project management, supply chain management, and logistics and operations management, as well as countless others.