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MBA Voices
MBA Voices
“I wanted to explore how the aerospace engineering community could help speed up the pace of innovation in renewable energy,” she said. “Ninety percent of my family still lives in Nigeria and Ghana, and those areas are heavily plagued by the energy crisis and still subject to rolling blackouts. I wanted to see if renewables could be something that could benefit those regions of the continent.”
Shodiya applied her aerospace engineering training to redesign wind turbine blades that could optimize the amount of energy generated. She poured herself into the project, but she and her professor couldn’t come up with a design that worked with such low wind speeds.
Shodiya was intrigued by the world of research despite those setbacks. But she decided to switch gears and gain experience in the air transportation industry, joining Boeing after graduation as a product design engineer for the 767 tanker and 787 Dreamliner. [...]
In May 2020, the MS/MBA: Engineering Sciences program graduated its first cohort of students, growing the program’s alumni base from 0 to 28. These alumni joined the program’s existing 32 Alumni Advisors - a group of entrepreneurs, VCs, and business leaders - in forming the program’s Alumni Network. In effect, the Alumni Network nearly doubled overnight. [...]
“Every organization has a really old device that they think they can’t part with. They feel a responsibility to keep it in their network,” said Breen, who graduated from the MS/MBA: Engineering Sciences program, jointly offered by the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and Harvard Business School, in 2020. “What are the solutions available to you to secure it, and increase its functionalities beyond that end of life and end of support?” [...]
Adam Palay (Class of 2021) knows a thing or two about making professional pivots. “After completing my AB and MS in English, and deciding to put a PhD on hold, I spent four months teaching myself how to code,” said Adam. He explained, “At the time, a lot of online learning platforms were launching – Coursera, edX, Udacity – and so I was able to learn to code from these new, high quality resources.” As it turned out, edX hired Adam and he spent the next five years in various engineering roles. Adam credits that “on-the-job experience” with teaching him most of what he knows about engineering. [...]
Eleven student teams were required to run a “design sprint” – a structured and rigorous process for quickly identifying critical questions facing a venture, and rapidly developing multiple answers to these questions to test with stakeholders. Jake Knapp of Google Ventures, who invented the Sprint process, ran the first two days, then handed over to faculty co-chairs Alan MacCormack and Russ Wilcox. The pressure was on the teams to make progress, rapidly building prototypes to a high level to generate insightful feedback on how well the solutions matched real customers’ needs. [...]
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The views and opinions expressed in the MBA Voices blog are those of the authors.
Any political views shared by students are their own; HBS does not endorse a
particular party or candidate.