ORIE was well-represented at the University Career Fair Days when alumni returned to campus as representatives of their companies and recruiters of current ORIE and other students.
The strength of the ORIE alumni network was in evidence when at least 20 ORIE alumni, representing 16 or more companies, came to Barton Hall for the annual Career Fairs that span two days in early September, one of which was specifically devoted to recruiting engineering students.
Among the alums who participated in the Career Fairs were Eric Gentsch '80, M.Eng. '81 and Siobhan McCabe M.Eng. '07 from LMI, Andrew Ng and Stephen Cheung '06, M.Eng. '07 from ZS Associates, Erica Mallare '08 and David Wolkoff '05 from Kurt Salmon Associates, and Lei Zhou '06 and Lindsay McCarl '06 M.Eng. '07 from Northrop Grumman.
Other alumni participants included Kalifa Pilgrim '04 M.Eng. '06 (Schlumberger), Edwin Sam '07 M.Eng. '08 (RMS), Joerg Rothenbuehler Ph.D. '04 (Capital One), Marisa Clark '08 (General Electric), Chris Groth '07 (C&S Wholesale Grocers), Chetna Bansal '96 M.Eng. '97 (Rosetta), Steve Miller '07 (Raytheon), Raj Jadeja '01 M.Eng. '05 (Applied Value), Dennis Li '07 M.Eng. '08 (VistaPrint), and Sam Davis '07 (Hewitt Associates). Richard Wu (Lehman) and Joanna Antisell (Oliver Wyman) also attended the fairs.
The cross-section of alumni attending the Career Fairs provided a broad view of the kinds of companies who recruit at the Career Fairs, the kinds of jobs ORIE students get, and the relevance of ORIE to careers. Attendees provided valuable advice to prospective employees. Although many of the alumni described in this article work for defense, consulting and logistics organizations, many other ORIE alums work at many of the companies who recruit at the Career Fairs in other business segments, notably in the financial services industry.
LMI is a not-for-profit government consulting organization founded in the Kennedy administration (as Logistics Management Institute). LMI has a long history of association with Cornell (The late Andrew W. Shultz, Jr., who established and led ORIE's predecessor department and was the Dean of the College of Engineering from 1963 to 1972, was VP Research and later Chairman of LMI). Eric Gentsch joined LMI after completing his MBA at Cornell and now directs the logistics analysis program at the McLean, VA headquarters of the organization, leading a group of about 30 people doing logistics R&D, inventory modeling, and economic analyses of logistics operations. Siobhan McCabe, who joined LMI after completing her M.Eng. in ORIE in 2007, is a research fellow at LMI, doing supply chain work for the Department of Defense. She said she is "looking into better ways to predict demand for sporadic parts," i.e. parts with sporadic demand. As an M.Eng. student McCabe held the Maxwell Fellowship, named after a student of Dean Shultz.
Gentsch noted that "my ORIE degree has been particularly helpful in understanding and analyzing the economics of business decisions and in cleansing and structuring the data needed for analysis." He pointed to LMI's recruiting of Cornell co-ops and graduates and sponsorship of several M. Eng. projects as evidence of LMI's ongoing active involvement with Cornell, which brings him back to campus frequently. "I especially like walking around campus without a 30-pound backpack and without any problem sets due," he said. He expressed concern that fewer Cornell ORIE candidates are interested in industrial ORIE applications than in the past, but "recent economic events may change that."
McCabe said that the value at LMI of her ORIE degree stems less from any specific courses she took than from the ability she developed through the program "to be presented with a problem and break it down into its various pieces and to analyze things and be able to make logical assumptions."
"I do not think that ORIE candidates are sufficiently aware that Schlumberger is interested in hiring for positions in manufacturing and supply chain," said Kalifa Pilgrim, who joined the oilfield services company in 2006 after completing her M.Eng. She is now a supply leader in a Houston manufacturing and assembly plant where components are made that are assembled into complex tools that go into oil wells. "I am in both a supply chain management and planning role, responsible for creating and managing the production plan for a $40M product line," Pilgrim reported. She manages a team of buyers and planners and is 'responsible for all make versus buy decisions. When I started as a master planner at Schlumberger, I used optimization and scheduling when creating my production plan, and simulation to analyze the flow of parts through our plant. An ORIE graduate is always looking for the best way to do things, which is why our degree is very useful in a manufacturing environment," said Pilgrim, who also has a BS from ORIE. Early next year, she will become production manager in the company's Belfast, Ireland plant.
Joerg Rothenbuehler, who received his Ph.D. degree from ORIE in 2004, was one of Capital One's representatives at the Career Fairs. He noted that Cornell is one of the core college recruiting schools for Capital One, where he manages statistical analysis at the Richmond, VA US headquarters, because "we had good experiences with candidates from Cornell, especially the engineering and economics departments." He said that his work at Capital One has been helped by the "wide variety of topics" to which he was exposed in his Ph.D. work, including his research in extreme value theory and his course work in regression and other statistical methods and in finance.
Lindsay McCarl and her undergraduate classmate Lei Zhou also traveled to Ithaca from Virginia for the Career Fair. They both work for a Chantilly, VA business unit of defense contractor Northrop Grumman called TASC (at one time a separate company called The Analytical Sciences Corporation) that consults for US intelligence agencies. McCarl, formerly Lindsay Clutter, has two major job functions at Northrop Grumman. She is a first-line section manager and a modeling analyst, working on a model of the data processing and data flow configuration of her consulting customer. "I do a lot of data analysis on the input and output, and use Excel for it all!" she said. While she was impressed with the caliber of the ORIE students who came to the Northrop Grumman booth at the fairs ("all of them had excellent conversation skills and were refreshingly friendly," she said) she was disappointed that more students did not stop by. She notes that no other degree would "match up to" the ORIE degree in terms of suitability for a position like hers. "ORIE is probably the most comprehensive program in the engineering school in that you can do so much with it," she said, adding that other ORIE majors just in her division do cost estimation and budget analysis, risk analysis and management, simulation and modeling, readiness, and business case analysis.
Chris Groth is a Business Analyst with C&S Wholesale Grocers, the second-largest food wholesaler and the tenth-largest privately held company in the United States. He is based in the Keene, NJ headquarters of the company, which distributes food to many supermarkets in the northeast U.S. and elsewhere. As a Business Analyst, he has held rotational positions in various departments, including "procurement (working with service level and inventory projects), warehouse operations (working on a labor-management software implementation that implements labor engineered standards:, and inbound transportation (working in the backhaul group)," he reported. "C&S is very interested in hiring more ORIE's," he said, noting that he acquired "intuitive supply chain knowledge" from Cornell courses, and his degree "has helped me to understand optimization, which is implicit and the software and processes of the company, at a deeper level and find opportunities for improvement."
General Electric Transportation is headquartered in Erie, PA, and celebrated its 100th birthday in 2007. Marisa Clark is participating in General Electric's Operations Management Leadership Program, a two-year rotational program. She is currently a fulfillment buyer for the new product introduction team, working with "the sourcing team, vendors and materials advisors to track material for the Kazakhstan and Egypt locomotives, [models] which are currently being built for the first time." She is using Lean Manufacturing and Six Sigma principles and found the ORIE classes dealing with scheduling, "specifically dealing with batch sizes and set up times" directly relevant to the manufacturing shop floor manager role that is one of her rotational assignments. "Technical understanding combined with the desire for a strong business acumen is what makes the Cornell ORIE candidate so strong," she said.
Sam Davis is an actuarial consultant in the Times Square, New York City office of the human resources consulting company Aon (formerly Hewitt Associates), working on "healthcare strategy and plan design, benchmark claims history, underwriting and pricing potential plans, negotiating bids," among the activities he listed. Davis noted that "of all majors at Cornell, ORIE and Math sync the best with actuarial techniques," but that very few of the ORIE majors he spoke with at the Career Fairs have passed Society of Actuaries exams, which are "essential to the professional." He observed that every ORIE student has already taken courses in many of the subjects of the first two actuarial exams, probability (ORIE 3500, formerly 360) and financial economics (ORIE 3150, formerly 350), that these exams (administered in the Binghamton suburb of Vestal) are computer-based, and that "it is much easier to get an interview by passing just 1 exam because it sticks out so much" since so few Cornellians take the exams. He noted that the exams have an 'emphasis on quick problem solving" and "knowing quick calculations" as well as understanding the basics.
Kurt Salmon Associates, a management consulting company that focuses on retail/consumer products and health care, has long employed ORIE graduates. According to David Wolkoff, who is a senior consultant based in New York City and Princeton, NJ and leader of the team recruiting at Cornell, "we have had a lot of success the last few years with students who have an ORIE background." Atlanta-based consultant Erica Mallare added that "the degree seems to lend itself to the type of work we do." Wolkoff has spent time "working with department stores, clothing vendors, home improvement stores and furniture stores," while Mallare, who joined the company this year, worked with "a leading book retailer to develop a slotting strategy for their distribution center." Mallare noted that she uses spreadsheet modeling, technical writing, and inventory analysis, "to name a few" Cornell subjects, in her work, but "I regularly use the analytical problem-solving skills" she developed in ORIE as well.
Wolkoff mentioned that he is impressed with the diversity of internship experience ORIE students have. "We saw students who interned in everything from manufacturing, to investment banking, consulting, marketing, etc. It's great to see how the ORIE background enables you to pursue such a wide variety of fields," Wolkoff said. Wolkoff advises ORIE students to "make sure you have a pretty strong idea of what you want to do before companies start coming to campus" since employers "really look through that resume to make sure the student's experiences demonstrate an interest in what the company does." He suggested that even if a student has not done an internship in the intended field, there are other ways to demonstrate interest: "write a research paper, study with a professor, take the lead in a club."
Chetna Bansal was Rosetta's fifth employee when she joined the company in 1999, just a year after the firm was co-founded by Kurt Holstein, an ORIE alum. Rosetta is now one of the leading interactive agencies building personalized, analytics-based marketing solutions. Chetna has become an Associate Partner working in the health care industry. "Rosetta is definitely interested in hiring ORIEs," she said, "but we hire across a broad range of backgrounds and experiences as long as the candidate can demonstrate strong analytical, strategic, and marketing skills and the ability to work effectively on teams." For her, "thinking about how to identify creative and effective solutions for business challenges" have been major contributions of her ORIE degree, particularly the project work in the M.Eng. program and other teamwork experiences that are part of the program.
In recent years several ORIE graduates have been hired by ZS Associates, a consulting firm specializing in sales and marketing that was founded 25 years ago by two Northwestern University professors. Among the employees are Stephen Cheung and Andrew Ng, who came to the career fair to recruit ORIE students and others. "Many of the ORIE candidates I met with showed determination and confidence," Cheung said, and "many wanted to get my perspective on staying an extra year for the OR M.Eng. (which I highly recommend.)." Cheung noted that he has "had many opportunities to apply what I have learned in optimization and data mining to the work I do now." One of his main projects looked at maximizing calls to high-value targets given the constrained size of the company's sales force. Another was a data mining project "to look at different variables so as to isolate growth drivers for a drug across various parts of the USA."
RMS (which stands for Risk Management Solutions) is another company with academic origins, in this case Stanford University. Edwin Sam is a risk analyst with RMS, working primarily as a consultant to the insurance and reinsurance industry from the company's offices in Hackensack, NJ. "At my work, we deal heavily with statistics and probability, which was what my ORIE background provided me with," he said. RMS specializes in so-called catastrophe risk, including natural disasters, terrorism, and pandemic disease. RMS is "interested in hiring more people with my background," said Sam. Like McCabe at LMI, Sam held the Maxwell Fellowship as an M.Eng. student in ORIE.
Returning to the Career Fairs for the second year, Steve Miller is now a project manager at defense contractor Raytheon and is located in the Boston area. "My group at Raytheon contracts primarily with the Transportation Security Administration, a major division of the Department of Homeland Security," Miller said. He is involved with the "execution of pilot tests and deployments of the next generation of security screening equipment," putting his "OR skills to use in the development of optimized staffing models, sales forecasting, and other analyses of business processes," he reported. Miller said that in his management role, "developing an approach to solving a problem is where I draw on my Cornell ORIE experience. Thinking through how to solve a problem and prove you're right is key," he noted, citing as an example his identification of "target" and "predictor" variables in developing a staffing model, followed by a quest for data and the use of data mining techniques to analyze "the influence of the predictors on the target and pick out the best variables to use." Miller said that "I know that our ORIE majors will be successful in whatever career they pursue."
Raj Jadeja has led management consulting engagements around the world for Applied Value LLC, which was founded in 1997 by former senior executives and partners from Arthur D. Little, a pioneering company in Operations Research. His ORIE background "provides the necessary analytical background" for his work, he said. At the fair "ORIE candidates were great as usual," he noted, observing that 'they have the right background without question," so that selecting from among them is largely "just sorting on personality." Jadeja, who has both undergraduate and M.Eng. degrees from Cornell, hopes that recruiting success will enable him to continue to return to Cornell as a recruiter.
After receiving his M.Eng. degree in ORIE, Dennis Li began working for VistaPrint, an online graphic design services and custom printing company that has 16 million customers worldwide. He is an analyst in the Analytics Department of VistaPrint, working to understand the behavior of the customers who visit the company's website. He said that "my company would definitely like to see more people with my background hired. For our analytics positions, we were looking for people who had a strong technical background, as well as an interest in business. At other schools, it may be easy to find people with one or the other, but [at Cornell] it was much more likely to find candidates with both." His group does a lot of hypothesis testing, and groups working in parallel to his do a lot of regression modeling and forecasting, so statistics plays an important role in the work. "I'd like to be able to introduce some optimization in the work that we do eventually," he added.
Li expressed some disappointment with the small number of ORIE candidates that came to the Vistaprint booth at the fair. "I think it is a little short-sighted of ORIE majors to exclusively investigate opportunities in finance and consulting when there are a lot of other great jobs not necessarily in those industries."
Most of the ORIE alums at the Career Fairs were recent graduates, glad to be back on campus and to see the recruiting process from "the other side of the table." Corporate recruiters come to campus throughout the academic year, with the career fairs providing them with a forum to interact early with large numbers of students and help them understand what the opportunities are at their companies.
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