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Great jobs are plentiful for Institute of Technology graduates in today's employment market
by kermit pattison
MICHELLE FORSTER began solving problems at an early age while growing up on a North Dakota llama farm. If the family needed a new fence, they spent the summer doing it themselves. If the tractor broke, they fixed it.
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| Michelle Forster (ChemE ’07), who received the Bobbie Huston-Cronquist Scholarship award, started her career at General Mills in Minneapolis as an intern after her junior year. She was hired on permanently as an Operations Management Associate, and recently relocated to Lodi, Calif. For the next 18 months, she will serve three rotations in project engineering, maintenance, and quality and regulatory operations. |
During high school, she set her sights on a career in chemical engineering. She was drawn to the University of Minnesota by the strength of its undergraduate chemical engineering program, ranked as one of the top in the nation. She said the department always felt intimate despite being part of a large research university.
“From my first visit to the U until graduation, I felt the professors were truly interested in the academic growth and personal progression and maturity of each student,” she recalls. “Many knew my name and would engage in casual conversation.”
Forster racked up honors such as the Thomas DuBruil Undergraduate Research Award, an IT merit scholarship, and the Bobbie Houston-Cronquist Scholarship. She credits several professors as major influences, including Raul Caretta and Prodromos Daoutidis, both of the chemical engineering department.
In her unit operations class, she learned to work in a team and rotated through three roles as planner, experimenter, and analyzer—an exercise in teamwork that prepared her for the professional world.
“They teach you to use your skills to find the information you need and how to learn in a logical way,” she said. “They prepared me to look at the entire situation and methodically solve the issue.”
After her junior year, Forster won an internship with General Mills as a packaging research and development engineer. She spent part of the summer designing a new package for microwavable vegetables that could be opened more easily.
General Mills offered her a permanent job as an Operations Management Associate, an 18-month training position in which she serves three rotations in project engineering, maintenance, and quality and regulatory operations.
In February, she and her husband (who also graduated from the Institute of Technology and works for General Mills) transferred to another plant in Lodi, Calif.
Such training programs have become more common over the last five years, said Sorenson-Wagner. Companies like General Mills and Ingersoll Rand are using development programs to recruit and groom future leaders.
“That seems to be something related to this generation,” he said. “There’s a group of students who want to be leaders. This is an opportunity for them to see the light at the end of that tunnel.”
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