 Purdue provided a robust foundational engineering education coupled with hands-on experience in labs. Students experienced challenging design projects that emphasize learning to work in teams. Cooperative education allowed me to not only gain work experience and begin to build our networks but to understand better what kind of engineer I wanted to be and therefore how to shape the latter parts of my curriculum to take coursework well aligned with career objectives. To be successful though with some of the best students from the state and from the nation required more than just book smarts. It required organization, planning, prioritizing, commitment, sacrifice, long hours, getting back up after failure and trying again and again. Engineering school at Purdue taught me how to do hard things. I think one of my favorite student experiences from Purdue as an aeronautical engineering student was when we would have laboratory classes held on the property of the Purdue airport. And so not only where we step it out of the lecture hall as almost any engineering student would do it into a laboratory at first some classes but our laboratory was on the grounds of the school's airport. So we had all these tools and equipment and we're doing experiments and we were steps away from full-size real aircraft taking off and landing at the Purdue airport and it was just it was like I've arrived I think you know this is not just you know going to a lecture hall and and just you know kind of studying somewhere anywhere I was at a place that had its own airport and had this you know tremendous amount of equipment and I just really felt like okay we're not going around anymore this is I am this is happening this is happening I'm really going to become an aeronautical engineer in this environment and that was that was pretty damn cool. I would say that my major career highlights was taking over a firm that I was a member of and reorganizing it and taking an underperforming investment fund and making it one of the top in the industry and how Purdue helped was the engineering degree and I tell people I got an engineering degree but I really got an engineering education at Purdue. It's as we all know it teaches you how to think it teaches you a way to approach your problem and especially in aero it teaches you how to make trade-offs you know I think I was very lucky to have gone into aero it wasn't I just did it because I liked aeronautical engineering I liked I'm a pilot I like to fly I you know like everything associated with it but what aero does which I think other engineering disciplines don't have is it has massive trade-offs you know the minute you want to make go faster you've got to put add more power the minute you add more power you got to add more weight more weight makes the airplane go slower you know on and on so there's trade-offs for everything and that's not really life but business is very much that way and how do you maximize one thing and how do you solve for one thing which in business generally is customer satisfaction of profits as opposed to to speed and distance but they're two sides of the same coin and I would have never thought that the engineering education was the I have an engineering education in an MBA and I use the engineering every day in the NBA once a month believe that engineering first of all is one of those disciplines that's extremely flexible and broad and gives one the opportunity to have a lot of different optionality in your career I think it also gives you the confidence to solve problems and also teach you the importance of teamwork which obviously has served me well in my career as a leader and executive in a company obviously you're coming from a diploma one of the top engineering degrees and top engineering universities in the country and it just gives you the confidence to take on challenges going to Purdue expanded my world and so in that world expansion without my Purdue degree I wouldn't have seen ever a larger world that I have so in my career I've traveled to 49 out of the 50 states Alaska is the only state that I'm not been to through my career working in various fields I have climbed inside of the cooling tower at a nuclear power plant while it was under construction then backstage at a Bruce Springsteen concert as part of a work assignment and I've been in a helicopter over a NASCAR race to observe traffic and that's a pretty exciting career and without Purdue opening up that world of possibilities to me I would never have gotten those types of really fun and cool experiences as part of my career getting admitted to Purdue was not an easy task my application for the admission was not considered the first time but I was determined to join the program at Purdue and I did once my foot was in the door the sky was the limit so excited about being at Purdue I was happily working very hard and enjoying every bit of it and my expectations were increasing by the day a few weeks after I was at school I approached Mr. Titianar the former university vice president and asked him how good should I be to earn Purdue's undergrad scholarship he said the mark for me and I left his office running down the stairs of half the hall full of joy and determination and by the end of the semester I was granted the scholarship a few weeks later I had approached Mr. Titianar again and asked him what does it take to keep my scholarship he smiled and told me you keep up and we keep on and this was one of the most motivating phrases I have always remembered Purdue helped me achieve my goals in a myriad of ways first of all just having the engineering credential opened many doors to opportunity also engineering built on my love of building I started out building technology and then organizations and then products and then brands and then global businesses so it was all about building something else Purdue really helped with is it really taught me to use my resources whether that was professors or teaching assistants society women engineers or the organizations it it really took that whole network to help me get through school it also the curriculum was very challenging and so just stepping up to meet the challenge of an engineering curriculum and then I also had to work to earn my way through school and just meeting those challenges taught me a couple things one that I was smart enough and resilient enough to achieve just about whatever goal I wanted to go after one professor in particular who was ahead of his time and he felt that instead of lecturing you know he said I want to prepare students for the workplace and so there were courses where we had projects to do with a local company you know in power engineering it was with electric utilities so we had a we had course we had a course where we had a team of people we had a real project to solve at Commonwealth Edison in Chicago and we we checked out a Purdue staff car we had appointments we had set up we drove to Chicago and had a full day of meetings with with key people at this electric utility and a real design problem to solve after my junior year in high school I received an invitation to participate in the minority introduction to engineering program or MIGHT that was organized by Marion Blalock so this was a great program focused on students from underrepresented communities in engineering and it was a one-week program to introduce students to the different disciplines of engineering so we had a number of hands-on labs we had activities for us to get to know Purdue and then of course in the evenings late evenings we had time to get together and have fun just as students and in particular high school students so that was great Marion was very inspirational and making certain we got places on time even if we stayed up late then you know after participating in the MIGHT program I was so enthused about engineering I applied along with many others in the program and after being accepted we were invited back in the spring of our senior year to participate in I believe what was called a preview program and during that weekend we became more familiar with our particular majors that we had identified and we also became familiar with different student organizations so for example I became familiar with NESB or the National Society of Black Engineers and that was great because now you are in a community with your peers you've been accepted you get to know some other students like for me from the Chicago area we all said okay if you go I'll go because we know each other it was great so a number of us accepted admissions and it was wonderful to see many of the students from the preview program as well as the MIGHT program there you know freshman year when my parents dropped me off I got to hang with friends and so it's been really great Purdue had an excellent program that prepared me well for my career what was really outstanding was its faculty including Dr. Jane Frasier who was my master's thesis advisor and Dr. Jim Barone I served as Dr. Barone's teaching assistant for IE 386 and I learned so much from both of them including both how to teach and how to do research that really set me up well for where I was to go in my future career Purdue University whenever it comes up the first sin to everybody's mind is what an amazing engineering school well with leadership college responsibility Purdue will continue to be that pre-eminent you know engineering school with highest standards to not just develop the best talent but also drive the research and the being in the forefront of pushing the limits of technology in partnership with academia as well as with the industry one of those areas being semiconductor manufacturing and technology this is a critical area that the United States and rest of the world critically need in order to ensure that you maintain the balance of the supply chain and the technology and innovation and the talent pipeline into the United States and Europe and driving the rest of the world to that supply chain resiliency this is critically important and Purdue being in the forefront of that it's something that I hope keep the momentum and keep pushing the capability forward engineering education was the foundation for my career but it was the IE co-op program that really changed my life I always wanted to work for Disney but unfortunately Disney was not participant with the Purdue co-op program but fortunately the IE program administrator became my partner and helped me connect with Disney and it changed all that I was the very first Purdue IE co-op at Disney this experience and opportunity really was the catalyst for my career but not just for me I am so thrilled that it so many have come after me we have had many Purdue IE interns and co-ops and full-time engineers which makes me so proud I started I was a first-generation college student my sister was actually my role model she was the first in our family to go to college and in fact she also went to Purdue and I was honored really to participate in Purdue's minority introduction to engineering program which was then led by the visionary Maryam Blalock and that experience was truly transformative being from a working class family of course the financial support issue was critical but the welcome that I received both from the minority introduction to engineering program and then also from the school of materials engineering was really critical to my success as a boiler maker to Purdue I really learned how to do a hard research project the classes were tough Purdue was tough the classes were tough it was a top five mechanical engineering program at the time the research was tough I learned that not everything in research works the way you want it to you kind of you know some things work and some things don't need learn from everything that happens and I learned from Purdue I learned that I myself I'm very resilient and tenacious in pursuing a goal and so by being able to get through that I gained a lot of self-confidence in my ability to do hard things but also to lead others to do hard things the best memory I have of Purdue is really nerdy I love challenges I'm competitive and some of the problem sets we get were incredibly hard and I can remember really late nights working in the library getting through a problem set walking home to the apartment or the dorm it was usually late at night often it was in the winter clear sky stars out and I just felt a sense of accomplishment that had gotten through a problem set that I didn't think I would be able to do the day before and it gave me the confidence to know that I'd be able to take on a bigger challenge the next day I'm proud to have worked for companies such as LG Electronics in Korea General Electric in USA and Samsung Electronics in Korea and currently I'm with the media group in China but one of the most significant achievement was my promotion to be an executive as vice president and the later senior vice president at Samsung where I was responsible for the development of laundry products and made a big impact on the American market the key to success was my deeper understanding of advanced technology which I obtained while studying for my PhD at Purdue the education I received at Purdue was invaluable and allowed me to excel in my field in addition to the education I received I also had the privilege of meeting and befriending international students from all over the world during my time at Purdue this diverse network of friends helped me tremendously when I was creating global island network and manufacturing basis for Samsung so I want to express my gratitude to Purdue for providing me with a solid education and for creating community where I could connect with people from all over the world. Every summer Ray and Barbara Visconta my advisor and his wife would invite all of their graduate students all of his graduate students and their families to their home for a summer barbecue. It was a warm and wonderful experience it was reflective of how he interacted with his students and and she was a full partner in that as well. Once at one summer party Ray was grilling hamburgers turning those burgers and he apparently burned them and all of us students heard his wife Barbara say my husband's a world-renowned expert and he transferred and he can't even grill a hamburger. He never thought of himself as being above any of us he was he loved to be in the lab he loved to have students in his office and so many of my memories revolve around that that very kind of feeling that I got.