SDM Virtual Information Session - Jan 2021

so i'm going to go ahead and get started just a couple of quick comments as we're going through the presentation i imagine a number of you are familiar with zoom presentations or webinars but we'd like for you to um utilize the chat to put some questions in there throughout the presentation and we'll either address them as we're going through this with my colleagues amal and amanda or we can talk about them towards the end of the presentation or also maybe even have some of our students who are joining address them as we start the panel afterwards but to start things off tonight my name is ben linville engler i am the industry and certificate director for mit system design and management a little bit about myself i am also an alum of the program so i'll be able to provide you both student perspective as well as a staff perspective working for the program now prior to joining mit sdm i worked in the medical device industry for a little over 10 years and can go into more of my background if folks are interested but i'll talk a little bit as we go through this what interested me in joining the program but then also a little bit more about the different ways in engaging with mit sdm so uh who we are in a little bit of history about the program we really are focused on solving complex challenges at the intersection of engineering and business and we've been doing this for a while now mit sdm is almost 25 years old actually the next year's cohort will be our official 25th cohort and 25 year anniversary so we were founded in 1996 in collaboration with industry at the time it was companies like united technologies or kodak or hp who came to mit and they're really looking for a program to help further educate the technology grounded leaders of the future and so mit sdm was formed as a joint program between the school of engineering and the sloan school of management and as i mentioned we really do further develop experienced technical professionals with an emphasis on enabling them to lead effectively and creatively and we do this by focusing on solving complex challenges with taking a systems thinking approach to multi-disciplinary problem solving model driven engineering design and strategic decision making and i'll touch on a couple of those themes here coming up so where do we fit at at mit as i mentioned we're really at the intersection of business and engineering and technology which really enables both our program and our students to have access to some really incredible resources across campus subject matter experts in business and leadership operations and more from the sloan school through their course courses or action learning labs as well as annual research symposiums and conferences similarly on the engineering side of the school mit sdm students have access to courses in all departments and opportunities to engage with labs across campus and we find that our students have a high participation in research and teaching assistant positions based off of the experience that they come into the program with from industry and other organizations and mit and the greater boston area for those of you maybe that are local or who have been in the area before it really is an incredible ecosystem and it's somewhat of a magnet for intelligent driven and creative people and so a lot of the sort of accidental connections that happen are really great opportunities to share ideas meet new people and maybe learn about new opportunities and as i mentioned we were originally formed in collaboration with industry and maybe some government organizations and that's a relationship that we really maintain and that's a lot of what my role is today is ensuring that we have great partnerships with companies that are either sponsoring students or maybe projects or other engagements and we really are that relationship is really important to our program because we very much focus on research in action right we want to take what we're learning but then how do we apply that into the businesses of today so where we play as i mentioned we take that systems thinking approach to systems engineering and we do that in our core class which i will dive into a little bit more in a minute but really looking at how systems thinking can be applied to systems architecture engineering and project management and really understanding the relationships and interdependencies between those for either a large program or maybe a new service that might be being developed another way of describing this is really looking at sort of a difference between maybe your undergrad engineering curriculum in which you are probably often taught to be a problem solver oftentimes math problems in undergraduate engineering are single single solution focused so you either get the answer right or you get it wrong the real world doesn't typically work that way so we really push our students to take this systems thinking approach to be problem seekers first and really understand the problem space the stakeholders that are involved right and oftentimes it's not just a single problem that you're solving but maybe a series of connected problems uh could be over a life cycle and then as you better understand that problem space is what what decisions do you have control over right to make some design decisions and choices and then how do you evaluate a solution space and the options that you have not just that single potential solution that maybe you started with i mentioned systems thinking a number of times already in the context of of sdm i want you to think in the terms of human connected design right it's really a holistic perspective and a way of learning understanding the relationships and the value of relationships connections and interdependencies between maybe people within your interacting with your product your service could be you know human to human connections or data transfer but really looking at how do you understand identify maybe even visualize those relationships that sometimes aren't necessarily easy to to see and from those relationships especially as these unfold over time what is the dynamic behavior and emergent properties that come through that whether it's you know architectural hierarchies organizations or even unintended consequences for things around safety and other control systems the the other aspect to this that i mentioned then is systems engineering and there might be um some folks who have experience with this or have heard of the organization in cosi or potentially you know a product methodology or development methodology called the v model within sdm as we couple that with systems thinking we're really looking at how do you integrate a wide range of disciplines into a team effort really understanding both the business and the technical needs of stakeholders and how do you deliver value how do you define what value is to those stakeholders and then ultimately what is the structured development process that you might go through right and that could be a traditional waterfall methodology or agile or others but whichever implementation methodology you may be pursuing how do you address risk and uncertainty throughout the full life cycle of the the product or service or system that you're designing for and really understanding those again those relationships between things like form function and frequency so that's a brief introduction to who we are at mit system design and management what i'd really like to talk to you more about now is who our students are many of them are will be very similar backgrounds to yourselves so i'd like to spend a little bit of time talking about the cohort of 2020 the students that are currently in the program so we really focus on having a high degree of diversity both in life experience and professional experience our students average about eight to ten years of professional experience this is a key differentiator that we have in our program when compared to other engineering management programs or maybe mba programs we also bring experience from a wide range of industries folks come in with backgrounds in technology software healthcare maybe aviation automotive and many many more this year about about 40 to 50 percent are either partially or fully sponsored by their company this does include members of the armed service from the u.s that come into our program every year and i'll talk about the ways in which you can pursue different degrees through scm but we do have opportunities for local commuters and we also find that roughly 50 percent of our students this year are from the us the other 50 percent are from outside the u.s and i'll talk about the makeup of our student backgrounds a little more as i mentioned our students have a large diversity of life experience and a lot of this also has to do with where folks attend from and we do like to meet people where they're at around the globe and we do this both through in-person and life synchronous digital delivery of our courses this year we have students that have attended class from it looks like i think it's about six different continents around the u.s and i'll show a little highlight video at the very end of how we've been able to do this this year to give you a little bit more sense of what how we've been interacting with students during covid and some of the educational background and i think we've had a few questions about this so to give you a sense of numbers we have both a master's degree pathway and a graduate certificate pathway and i'll explain the difference between those two here coming up but in total we roughly welcome about a hundred students into the both of these programs combined every year that make up our core class roughly two-thirds so say 65-66 it's not a hard number every year but about two-thirds are in our master's degree program and about one-third are in our graduate certificate degree program but in total between the two about half of all students coming into the sdm programs already have a master's degree some already have a phd potentially a jd you'll hear from one of those students this evening but everyone at least has a bachelor's degree coming into the program now that's the degree type but let me tell you a little bit more around the specific degrees that they they're coming from and year over year this does change but we do see a large percentage of our students come in from mechanical engineering might be working on large industrial systems or automated systems but we also have a significant student population from electrical engineering or computer science software engineering and is it what you can see here is that about any type of technical background we generally have at least one student coming from that area we've had in recent years a number of nuclear engineers or petroleum engineers but we also do have some folks that come from maybe non-traditional more business backgrounds or even some some doctors in past years and again that is going to be a little bit different depending upon how you look at this across the master's degree or across the certificate degree and then just a kind of a view of industry backgrounds and this is a little bit of an overlap between the master's degree pathway and the certificate pathway again thinking in terms of the full 100 students that come into sdm every year but you can see we have you know agriculture automotive a number of energy students has been increasing in the recent years healthcare medical device products thinking about defense infrastructure aerospace manufacturing and what i will say is if you don't see your industry here don't worry again this changes year over year but we do really look to have a wide or a high degree of both life experience and professional experience in the program and i will say this is this was one of the major drivers for me uh to come into the program when i joined in 2016 i'd been working for one company for a little over 10 years in the medical device space i really knew how they operated as a company both in the business side and the engineering side but was really interested in learning from those 100 peers in the classroom who also have significant experience and are subject matter experts in their own right how they've solved similar problems or different problems or how their organizations were structured and so i will say you know as you look to join the program and if you get into the program you're going to learn a lot from faculty and instructors but you have an opportunity to learn a significant amount from your peers that are in the same cohort and classroom as you and again thinking in terms of industry here's where some of our current students are have are either currently employed or most recently employed as i mentioned about half of our students continue to be employed and maybe work even part-time while they're in sdm while others may have left their job to be full-time students and there's you know different ways in which you can work your way through the program depending upon your current situation so amal and amanda i haven't been keeping track of questions are there any that we should stop and answer right now that you have seen uh it's mainly about um which background will fit with sdm um a lot of them think they need to be an engineer or um very technical to apply uh so if you can address that and just the difference between um the certificate versus the masters and classes being online and how is that going forward great so yeah let me talk a little bit about sort of the background i would say the majority of our students do come in with an engineering or technical background the stm core class which i'll talk about here in a second which i think will also answer some of the questions around the differences between the graduate certificate degree and the master's pathway but i would say the majority of our students do come in with a previous engineering or technical degree and a lot of that also has to do with the work that they've been doing and where their experience comes from part of our application is the academic background but we also do look to understand what you've been doing in your career thus far eight to ten years after either a college degree or even a master's degree is a lot of time to sort of exercise the capacity that you may have beyond what your degree was in and so that's really some of how we look at the application from a holistic standpoint is it's not just a single aspect that is going to necessarily be um looked at solely on its own but we really do look at what is the experience that you've had what have you demonstrated in your career thus far on your capacity to you know solve complex challenges or understand and communicate technical matters so i would say that you know we do have some students that like i mentioned come from non-traditional backgrounds and maybe we'll have a chance to talk with one coming up as we get into the student panel to learn a little bit more around their decision to come into sdm and then their experience in navigating the program i'm going to quickly talk about how the degree pathways are structured and then i'll have a little bit more to comment on you know some of the course requirements that you may you may need to think about as you're looking at applying for sdm so we have this sdm core class all 100 students take that whether you're in the master's degree pathway or the graduate certificate degree pathway our sdm core is split into system architecture system engineering and project management like i mentioned if you're in the graduate certificate program that is the majority of what you're doing this is taken from fall through spring and then our certificate students finish a summer capstone project and so that graduate certificate is a full year where you start in august you take your your core class through sdm through may of the following year and then you complete your certificate capstone and that's that's that graduate certificate program so you do take it with fellow master students however our master's degree pathway continues outside of the core class and you're required to take a balance of engineering and management courses so you'll see that we have a few different levels of engineering management courses we have what we call depth and foundation courses which are going to be very much you know system design adjacent courses on the engineering side things like system safety or human systems engineering and then you may find things on the management side in this depth foundation ring that are going to be more similar to what you might find from an mba core series of classes outside of that you have a wide selection of in both engineering and management electives as i mentioned on the engineering side our students have access to all of the departments of the school of engineering as well as a large amount of the course catalog from the sloan school and to finish out the master's degree there is a 24 credit thesis and something i need to mention is that at mit and this can be very different depending on you know your past education experience one credit is roughly equivalent to one hour per week right and so as you're going through different courses they may be credit weighted at 9 12 some are even at 15. that's the estimated amount of time that you would be spending on that class that week and they are further broken down into instructional time in the course as well as maybe a recitation or a lab section and then time expected to be spent outside of the class now what i will say is that there's a a large number of pathways for students to find their way to an sdm master's degree i you know i come from a medical device background i focused on health related classes also biology or bioscience classes and so my pathway through sdm was quite unique to my interests where someone who maybe i sat next to in the core class was following a completely different pathway and so we do have some targeted pathways to help folks kind of maybe better understand you know if i want to focus a lot on analytics or ai machine learning i'm going to focus on this subset of classes and i don't need to necessarily worry about these and these are really like some decision guides to help you think about how to select your courses we have these in sustainability and energy things like healthcare infrastructure entrepreneurship and innovation and there's opportunities to get further certificates through either the sloan school or the engineering school on some of these but that's a very detailed question that maybe as you look to you know get into the sdn program and ultimately register for courses we support you with that there ben that might be a good time to answer one question that's come up a few times which is if students enroll in the certificate program and are accepted into that and then want to um be transitioned into the master's program do they need to do the full application i don't know if you wanted to mention that quickly i'm all okay yeah i'm happy to also answer that one so if you do start in the the certificate program again that is a one-year program and we look at that as you know that's the program that you are interested in applying to and that you maybe were selected into there is a pathway to ultimately transition from the graduate certificate program to the master's program it's it does require you to complete the full master's degree application we also do look for you to complete the core classes because that's going to give us an indication also about your ability to continue into other mit engineering courses so if you're if you're if your ultimate goal is really to be in the master's degree program you might consider applying directly to that program that said we've structured it this way that you can ultimately transition because we do understand that in this you know range of eight to ten years of work experience which actually from year to year is roughly a continuum of about three to thirty years of work experience there's a lot of um variability in terms of how people can commit their time or financial support to maybe take on the full master's degree so i would say each year right now we probably have five to seven students that do apply to transition from the graduate certificate to master's degree and it really is a case-by-case basis as to whether or not they're accepted into the full master's degree moving forward now maul is there anything else you'd like to add uh i would just say like from an application perspective so you will have to fill out a new application and you will go through the process of admissions um just like everybody else you'll be evaluated the only thing that's different is the requirements so you won't need as much you would need one recommendation letter and you kind of update the old application and two new essays and then obviously we will consider the grades you've received so far in the certificate program as part of making the decision great thank you amal so moving forward and i do want to be cognizant of time to make sure that we can also get to more q a and also spend some time with our current students and alumni that are here for a panel i mentioned that we are quite career compatible uh we want to meet you where you're at around the globe or in your career or in your life and so we have a wide degree of flexibility in in program length and approach to pursuing your degree both you know we have on-campus full-time local commuters so we do have folks that maybe work in boston or the local community and come into classes during normal times and we also have opportunities to engage at a distance i mentioned that we do provide a synchronous digital delivery of our lectures so prior to kovid we had students both on campus in the classroom roughly two-thirds and about a third of them of our students that were were actually attending live lectures through zoom um so we were actually in a good position uh to transition to full um virtual campus back in april and so this is something that you know we do plan to continue as a hybrid way in the future and that really depends upon students ability to come to campus or not what i will say is there is regardless of um whether or not you come to campus for the core um but if you're pursuing the master's degree there is an mit institute requirement that you spend at least one semester on campus and if you're going through the graduate certificate pathway we do require you to be on campus for at least three weeks typically that's one week in august when we start the program for a boot camp an orientation one week in january to kick off a spring project and then also one week in may for final presentations now these requirements have been addressed for the current situation they were in with kovid and we will continue to evaluate these you know as we get closer to the fall and looking at the 2021 academic calendar and what ultimately mit decides to do for in-person learning this one i'll just quickly show this isn't comprehensive this is just some sample degree pathways with credit minimums as i mentioned in year one we have our graduate certificate program typically everyone here is working at least part-time if not full-time and you'll see that you have 15 credits in the fall 6 during this iap or january period and then another 15 in the spring so a total of 36 credits and then a summer capstone and that's again the end of that graduate certificate program and you may transfer into the master's degree at a later date with an application and admission now we do have again different ways in which students pursue the degree on the master's pathway there's on campus maybe commuter distance or accelerated these are just samples of some of the more common ways in which we see it the accelerated one isn't anything that we we generally promote it's typically reserved for students that maybe come from the armed services and only get a very short amount of time to pursue a graduate degree but you can see that it enables flexibility for folks that do want to continue working while pursuing a master's degree but do it does require again a an on-campus period which is typically about three three to four months now uh prior to covid and this has continued during this time we've been working with a number of professors and instructors across mit to enable more distance based courses where we do have that that hybrid synchronous zoom option and these are courses that we find that a number of our students are interested in advanced practices in research in engineering project management technology road mapping and development multi-disciplinary design optimization or systems architecting applied to enterprises this list may be subject to change but this is what we went into this year with knowing that we had these as distance options obviously most or if not all classes at mit right now are provided with a digital option i won't spend much time here but we do have some mitx pro offerings from our instructors that are more introductory to some of these topics we do have some students that start here and then ultimately apply into the full degree programs and amanda i'm sorry i'm gonna i'm gonna go through the employment report quite quickly um but this is also a question that we get is you know what do we see from you know that the impact on someone's career and potentially their salary after graduating again this is our master's degree and it's data for students who graduated by january december 2019 and and remember that not all students are maybe getting a new job after they graduate a large number of our students are not transitioning uh to a new company and just a quick note on that ben that um i always get the question at these events so i think it's a good time to just quickly mention that the reason we are doing 2019 here and not 2020 is because we have three graduation dates and so we um compile the formal 2020 um employment report in the middle of 2021. great thank you amanda and just what i was going to say here is on average the students come into scm with a mean salary of roughly just under 100 000 but you can see it's quite a wide spread and then we do see on average about a 46 increase after graduation and mean salary for those that do transition jobs but again it doesn't mean that you're going to be guaranteed to get this salary we do see that some students may be pursuing different opportunities have a lower salary base uh maybe other opt you know incentives or things and some also do find a higher salary base so it is quite a range and we also do see that a number of our students stay in the northeast we also find that the west coast a lot in the maybe bay area or los angeles area are quite popular but we do also see students go to the midwest southeast and then also opportunities outside the u.s

just a quick sample and view of some of the different employers that we have recently found our graduates going to the employers who we find hiring multiple engineers or multiple sdm alums are highlighted with bolding and an asterisk companies like tech tesla shell tech works i'm one of these folks that stayed on here at mit and there's others amazon robotics has a strong presence here in massachusetts but you can see it's a wide range of industries right there's not a single sort of strength overdone in terms of industries and then again types of roles or types of jobs we have some students that start their own companies and they become a co-founder or ceo or cto but we also have a number of folks that go into director positions either on the technical side or maybe even the business development side of the company or roles such as product management or program manager as well and these range anywhere from you know senior roles up to maybe executive level roles as well and just quickly here from my role i mentioned that we have a strong connection with industry we look to collaborate you know not just with uh industry but also government and other organizations such as non-profits and we're really trying to utilize our capacity to convene multi-disciplinary and cross-industry collaborations this comes through sponsorship of students core course team projects which i'll briefly touch on guest lectures maybe internship or full-time hires during normal times we also do go on site visits at local companies in the boston or greater boston area as well as typically an annual trip to the bay area and then also opportunities in sponsored research so from the industry view there's a lot of different ways to engage that a lot of which i highlighted on but one thing that i'll point out here that i didn't talk much about is our alumni community if you think about sdm as being 25 years old an average person coming in with eight to 10 years of work experience we have some alumni that have a significant amount of career experience and we try to to leverage that as much as we can in engaging our alumni and so that's an opportunity again as being part of the sdm community it's not just those students that you're in the classroom with but also alumni that you have an opportunity with to connect and network with or learn from i'll just briefly touch on our spring project since we just kicked this off you get a sense of some of the companies that we work with this is something that we kick off at the beginning of january every year and the students work on these projects through may but you can see a wide range of different types of companies and industries represented large global companies smaller you know tough tech startups this year we had 41 project proposals from i believe 35 company sponsors in this we have the company's reverse pitch to the students so it's very competitive from the company standpoint we only have enough student teams for about 20 to 25 projects each year and you can see you know a collection of really interesting topics and it makes it really uh we try to make it hard on the students because there's a lot of really great things to work on and just lastly i mentioned you know this year for covid we um obviously have continued utilizing our live digital delivery of lectures but for this particular event we've also invested in an mit virtual space so just want to quickly share with you and i want to turn my volume down because i don't want it to hurt your ears but i'll quickly share a video of a recent event that we just had last week so you get a sense of some of how we're engaging right now but also a sense of what we do with our alumni in our community [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so i'm going to stop there i know we've had a number of questions in the chat that we've tried to answer we're going to also bring on a number of students here to also jump in and help answer questions amal or amanda do you see any from the chat that we should address now or i think it's a good time to go ahead and introduce our student guests uh one more question ben and then we move to the panel and it's about waiving credits in either programs so if you have a credit from outside mit or within mit do we accept them and wave classes yeah that's not a question i feel like i have a good answer for right now so if that's your question i'd recommend that you reach out to us and we can follow up with you on that one on an individual basis my experience and just feeling with it is based off of the degree requirements that require mit credit it's likely that those would not transfer but that's something that we can look into for you if that's something that's really important so now what i'd like to do is quickly introduce we have three students two that are current students one a recent graduate we have erwin franz irwin if you want to do a quick wave i'll ask you all in succession here coming up introduce yourself with a quick background um bishop revanelle bishop i saw you earlier and then also david park is joining us as well and each of them can provide a little bit of background starting with erwin about you know your work experience maybe a couple reasons why you joined stm and what you're currently doing hi guys thank you van i i work developing medical devices specifically respiratory i've been part of r d groups for a long time and i wanted to start leading them and that brought me to sdm i am almost finishing the program and i'm happy to be here guys and answer any questions you might have thanks erwin and bishop do you mind doing a short introduction sure my name is bishop ravenel i graduated in may of last year in my background i was a federal prosecutor for about a decade and spent some time in the marine corps and mid-career i came and i did a year at stanford and spent some time at mit including the sdn program great thanks bishop great to see you by the way and uh david if you could do a short introduction yeah sure absolutely hey guys i'm david park um i mostly spend my time in the telecommunications industry in software development and delivery roles um so i've done a lot of project management uh system engineering and also development work and uh i just wanted to use this program out to move up to a leadership role so yep that's been my journey and i'm a first year for the program great thanks guys and i just do want to say uh it's the first for me to see someone from the u.s space force on a zoom meeting uh so that's uh that's a nice a nice to see good to see you jason um so maybe a place to start with some quick questions is you know we did have people asking about their their background maybe both academic and work experience can you talk a little bit more about maybe your either technical or non-technical backgrounds and how that both of those opportunities set you up for sdm and how you found yourself fitting into the program uh erwin will go ahead and start with you and just keep this in the same order okay i have a bachelor's in mechatronics engineering and then i did a postgraduate degree in computerized manufacturing i ran my own company for a few years and that led me to do an mba and i had those those postgraduate degrees before joining the program and bishop we know you you spent some time as a prosecutor so could you explain a little how you were able to sort of utilize that experience and with what you learned in sdm and the rest of the degree yeah sure so my intent was to start a company or do something different i did that for a while across two schools and i just decided to shelve it kind of at the beginning of covid and started looking at other things decided to go back to government and kind of what i would say is that sdm teaches you a new way to look at the world and that problems and in talking to donna rose my thesis advisor basically was like hey this is a sector you like you can apply all the same techniques in the sector so i think that if you try to transition or you try to go back you're developing a new way to look at the world as it is a complex world with increasing complexity great thanks and david how about yourself yeah well my my background i actually studied a chemical engineering and electrical engineering for my undergrad i have a master's in computer science and since most of my education background was in a very hard sciences than technology i wanted uh some business related background however i wasn't fully committed to going for an mba i wanted to stay out and work with engineering which is why i wanted to go for this program great thank you and maybe we'll go reverse order on this one we had a question come in for the students um have you or did you hold a full-time or part-time job while doing the program so david maybe we'll start with you yeah sure um i'm actually working full-time right now and a lot of my classmates are still working full-time or part-time um you know many of us have been working in our industry for a while so sometimes we have a flexibility with work sometimes i use schedule your courses so that it doesn't conflict with work so there are many people who carry on their jobs along with their education great thanks and david are you doing the core only are you taking courses beyond the core as well i i am taking the core and i took awesome courses um this year it was a bit special uh due to covet uh with everything remote uh scheduling worked out pretty well uh with uh no commute and uh uh and whatnot so yes i've taken our core and other classes as well great thanks uh and john how about you i don't recall if you were working while you were going through stm i had a part-time job but it was very insignificant so it was mostly sdm and then you were also working on getting your company up and going is that right you're not going to need entrepreneurship yeah i was big in that field right and erwin i know you've done a mix of things as well as you've been in the program yes so i was a full-time employee the first year i did the core like that and then i took a leave of absence to finish the degree and i'm currently in that process of transitioning back to my you know to work with my employer and erwin you're one of our core tas as well so he's he's uh he's going through the scm core twice if you will to learn it the second time but also to help teach it so anyone have questions about that i'm your man great um i'm looking through the chat here there's some questions around extracurricular activities i'll comment on this one just from my experience is that there's a lot that goes on at mit especially if you're interested in engineering science technology or a whole lot of other um you know aspects of let's just say technology in general managing your time is one of the hardest things that you have to do right there's a lot of different ways to learn whether it's through courses or extracurricular activities and so that's depending on what you're interested in there's clubs that you can join you know there's a lot of different types of hackathons with different focus there's labs that you can get involved in and learn new skills around making things um you know erwin john or david feel free to to add in any that you guys have have done from that extracurricular side of things yeah i was really involved in sandbox i was there for a year before i started sdm and sandbox is a like an accelerator but basically all you have to do is walk down the infinite corridor and you're just gonna see a million flyers and there's no way you're gonna be able to handle all the extracurricular opportunities and every single thing you could possibly want to do you learn how to fly a plane while you're at mit if you want to check on that so i i did some for my thesis project i got involved with some professors and we pitched a project with the mit sandbox as well and mit gave us some money to actually develop the prototype so so that's one of the extracurricular activities that i got involved in one thing i would add too is that it doesn't matter if your mba or your sloan or your sdm or anything like that once you get into mit in terms of the types of teams you can build or the access you have so it's not like there's different class citizens if you get in you're at mit you're considered worthy to be at mit and you can go anywhere and do anything in mit you know what i would say is that you know the sdm program is a great entry point in that you're somewhat forced to go to different parts of campus you're you have engineering courses you have courses in the sloan school again this is during on campus time which we're optimistic about for next year um so it's you're going to meet a lot of really interesting people and to me that was one of the biggest takeaways is is that the network and the people that you meet who are also there to do some really incredible things and you get exposed to things you've never even thought of and so it's just a really exciting place to be so i see a few questions around scholarships or funding options currently sdm does not offer fellowships to students as i mentioned there's a number of different ways in which you can go through the program and so we have both high tuition and low tuition rates depending on the number of credits that you take per semester or there's opportunities that if you're just doing the core classes only you know that that's going to be a reduced tuition rate than if you were doing a full set of classes and then also the question around ra and ta roles often those roles depending on which school they're in they do cover a significant amount of your tuition or even a stipend it is going to vary on roll the roll and ultimately which school that that's with but we do find that a lot of our students who are interested in finding those types of roles often do there's not like a great guide on how to find one of those often it's based off of maybe your experience or you took a class and you create a relationship with the instructor or you may have a specific background right that a lab is really interested in what i will say is you know our our students come in with a significant amount of experience and you know already know how to do a lot of things and so that's a pretty high value not necessarily to call it a commodity but a high value level of experience for labs and instructors across campus uh looking through some questions here uh can you talk about uh the time when the core is and like the day and time that it's available and are there any night classes or a weekend and so on yeah so the the stm core um is typically scheduled so it's 15 credit hours in the fall right so if you remember back that's roughly one one hour per credit per week so if you think about your week you've got 15 hours we take six of those hours for um course and recitation time and so that's broken now into we have the the classes our lectures are scheduled on monday and wednesday between 11am and 1pm this is eastern time right boston time uh and we've scheduled it that way because it is uh relatively accessible for folks across the globe now there are some exceptions to that and during covert we've made accommodations um then again these are live synchronous so if you're in the boston area and you're an on-campus student you're in the classroom um during normal times and if you're taking it as a distance student right you're logged in through zoom and we have a special setup in the classroom so that your face is present when you ask questions you're up on a jumbotron basically so that's the course right monday wednesday 11 a.m to 1 p.m it's two hours each of those lectures and then there's a recitation session in between so tuesdays and thursdays you're expected to attend one hour recitation session uh now there's two two sections for that typically during normal years uh there's an 11 to 12 11 a.m to 12 p.m eastern or then the following hour 12 p.m to 1

p.m on tuesday and thursday so six hours um there with an expectation of nine hours of time spent out of you know the classroom and recitations and that's geared a lot towards team-based projects and homework assignments uh and we expect you to be you know working with team members that are also maybe across different time zones so finding times to coordinate and work together a lot of times it's nights and weekends for other courses at mit right those schedules are going to be varied right now when you look at the course catalog for this year things have been somewhat compressed to try to accommodate for a broad set of time zones but we've also found that uh courses um and sdm has done this has extended different recitation sessions or opportunities to engage with tas or instruct instructors to accommodate for you know time zones maybe in the asian continent or maybe even australia right now what i will say is in looking at 2021 and the plan for mit there's uh there's still a lot of questions there uh the higher level institute has not committed to what that's going to look like yet we're all optimistic with where things are at with the vaccine right now but there's a lot of variables that go into that in terms of what will be on campus and what may what may not be just a quick question on the gmat gre requirement there's some specific language on our website right now about how we're handling that um currently it's not a requirement for the application if you have taken it uh either recently or you know in a distant past you're welcome to submit your score it won't be counted negatively against your application right it can only have a positive impact but if you haven't taken it there are challenges around scheduling that and taking that right now so it's not something that's required for this current application cycle that may change you know next year as we get back to hopefully a postcovid time a question on when does the session start on campus i don't have the specific you know this is the date that the 2021 academic calendar year is going to start it's typically right at the beginning of september but for mit sdm we host a boot camp orientation for cohort building and an introduction to mit in the program typically in the week to two weeks before that and that's something that we provide information on as we get further into the year so typically i'd say you know mid-august is when you would likely be seeing your first required sessions with sdm and for that graduate certificate requirement of being on campus for you know roughly three weeks out of the year that august week is the first week on campus i've seen a few questions come through around you know i have four and a half years of experience or is there a requirement that you have past systems engineering experience there's a guideline right we're looking like i mentioned it's on average of 8 to 10 years of work experience but that's not not you know a requirement it is a continuum and we take into consideration you know again your academic background and what you've achieved in your career and i'll say from personal experience there's a difference between quantity of experience and quality of experience right so you may have accomplished a tremendous amount in a three year period right depending upon the role and responsibility that you've had really what's important is that you communicate that to us right why has what you've been done in those three years based off of your academic experience set you up for this how does sdm ultimately enable you to achieve the next goals that you have in your career and so for those of you that are you know sort of on the cusp you know it really depends upon again not just the the length of your experience but the quality of that and what you've done in terms of how we look at your application and i see someone here who's gone through our graduate certificate program nick curious if you have any um you know any comments in terms of your experience in going through the one-year graduate certificate that you might care to share with folks and great to see you by the way hey good to see you too um it was definitely an experience um you know it's it's a unique thing getting to do that with mit and spending a year remote um it's it's definitely different from the master students so if you're interested in doing the master's program i recommend starting there there's definitely a different thing but you still get you're still part of the same cohort and you go through the same core classes and so it's definitely changed my way of thinking i think john mentioned that it does change the way you think about the world and it's a lot of work especially working full-time but it's definitely worth it great thanks nick um yeah i saw a question come through around application cycle and in the mall i may lean on you to correct me if i answer this incorrectly but the the application the first round came in about two weeks ago so we're going through reviews of that the second round of applications is going to be due uh on april 2nd and the question is you know if you if you apply or if you submit your application before april 2nd is it considered on a rolling basis my experience is that we we look at them once the deadline comes in on april 2nd so it's not that if you applied today that you would have um you know a review prior to what someone might be who applies on april april 2nd does that sound right i'm all uh yes that's correct um what we do is we do allow a week after the deadline for everybody to catch up like recommenders they usually are behind um so after that week you are part of that round you will be looked at for that deadline anything past that week you will be considered for the second deadline and that has its own dates um but also if there is a need of a rush decision if you have i don't know military company requirements that you need a decision outside our deadlines let us know and we can work with you on a case by case other than that it's whatever the deadline is will apply to you and we do take four weeks after the deadline to to read the applications and review them um after four weeks we will meet and i'll reach out and when i reach out it's either you get a request to be interviewed or unfortunately a reject or encourage reject will let you know what's needed and then the interview process takes about another three weeks to four weeks and then you get a final decision of an offer or whatever the case is so total of eight weeks from the deadline great thanks amal and just real quick there's the question around the credit hours of the two different pathways the graduate certificate program and the master's program that core class is 36 credit hours right from august to may so that's over the fall term an iep january period in the spring term the graduate certificate has a capstone project that is an additional nine credits so in total the graduate certificate is 45 credit hours 36 of those are transferable if you become a master's student that capstone project is one that's not transferable if you are then um you know looking at the master's degree pathway there's an additional 54 units that are required of you know that mixed engineering and management coursework that you're looking to to achieve and so that brings the total up to about i think right at 90 credit hours but then you have to also remember there is a requirement for a 24 credit uh thesis uh as well that's that's taken into account for that and those you know vary in terms of who your advisor is in topics in engineering or management there's a website in irwin i don't know if this is something you can add to the chat for the the d space site if students are interested in looking at thesis work that our students have done you can find the sdm community for thesis you can read my thesis or john's thesis or a whole bunch of others to kind of get a sense of some of the research that our students do and instructors that they meet a question about international students applying uh based on round one or two we do encourage you guys to apply by the first deadline just because of visa processing and if you need to relocate the whole process will be longer for you than a domestic student so we encourage you to apply by the first deadline but that doesn't mean you can't apply by the second deadline if you think it'll fit uh with your dates and depending on the country you're from and how long it's going to take for the visa if that fits then you can go ahead and apply by the second deadline and also that's where a rush decision might apply so if we need to rush you so that you can meet all the deadlines we'll do that um so we do work on case by case uh you just need to communicate that with me and also sdm program as a program we start once a year so you have to start in august for orientation or book camp what we call and then the official start would be in september with the rest of mit and mit's academic calendar does apply to our students even though we start in august so keep that in mind are the terms the start the end date the ad the drop all of that will apply to you great so we're coming up just a little bit past an hour i just want to say a quick thank you to irwin john and david thank you guys for joining us and sharing some of your background and experience with sdm before we close off is there anything else that you guys would like to add you know as you may might be remembering back to when you were applying for the stm program the question more time ben is i just if there's anything else that you'd like to add you know for prospective students that you might remember from when you were thinking about applying and you know now that you have sort of the hindsight experience yeah i mean i think the engineering and management combo is something really important when you think about the types of problems you have to deal with nowadays like you're still going to get your core like finance and strategy and stuff like that out of sloan but you're dealing with stuff that's more realistic sdm deals with the complexity that you're really going to face so i think it's kind of like it's the next iteration of what you're going to see from business schools and management programs thanks john um i will compliment that if if you have a vision as a professional there's no better place than mit probably on the sdm program to achieve whatever you guys want because there are so many options for you to get whatever you need i like to refer to it as a choose your own adventure program which is it's a a great place to do that as mit and i'll just say from you know my personal experience and then i oversee the graduate certificate program what you learn in the stm core and a lot of these systems adjacent classes are is highly translatable between industries and technical domains you know again we work on projects every year from agriculture to automotive aerospace things that don't start with a's you know medical devices software technologies you name it you know there's ways to architect it right and figure out how to connect value to what you're doing so i'll just echo you know i think the engineering management combos is really strong i'm a little biased because i'm an alum um but i hope that you all found this to be uh informational if you have questions feel free to reach out to us and we look forward to reading your applications if you do decide to submit one so thank you all very much

2021-03-03 07:35

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