LGO Admissions

Now that I am blogging for both LGO and (soon) for the EECS department, I thought I’d write a post specifically for prospective students about the admissions process. That might be slightly more relevant than shaky videos about football games.

In terms of LGO, I am coming from the perspective of somebody who did not have a whole lot of operational or manufacturing experience – in fact, I’ve never worked for a company has actually turned a profit! Even worse, I don’t even have an undergrad engineering degree – I was applied math (or fake engineering, as I like to say). And there are several of us in the ’11 class who have similar backgrounds, so don’t sweat it if you haven’t worked on a factory floor or in a supply chain environment.

That being said, if you haven’t had the industry background, I would recommend visiting LGO either for an info session or on your own as soon as you can. LGO is a unique program, and it may not be for everybody. Going to these sessions is not just about getting the “official” information (most of which you can find on the website anyways), but about meeting your potential future classmates to see if you fit in. Personally, I was on the fence at first about LGO (then LFM) for the reasons I mentioned earlier, but after attending an info session I got really fired up, mainly because the people I met were awesome, and that even helped me write my admissions essays.

Now, if you haven’t had industry experience, that’s O.K., but you should figure out why you want to focus on operations and/or manufacturing. The essays and the interview will be focussed on that question. I know I only had a vague idea of what operations meant before I applied, so if you are in that boat, I would suggest checking out the INFORMS website for some more information – as I found out, Ops is about a lot more than just assembly lines. For instance, I found that my background in applied math and statistics has been a perfect preparation for a lot of the latest challenges in operations and manufacturing, but I didn’t know that going into the process. Instead, I tried to play that down, thinking it wasn’t relevant.

Maybe my best advice for those with atypical backgrounds would be to try to find how your experience relates to operational challenges. I guarantee that you can find something that you can speak to and get excited about, and that will help in your essay writing. Particularly if you lack industry perspective (like I did right about now a year ago), I’d be happy to help out if you send me a message.

As an introduction to the topic of Opeartions, I’d like to pass on a reading recommendation that Chris Lin posted on his blog last year that really helped me out.

BONUS:

You should also check out the roster of current LGO partner companies – they are the ones who are going to be paying for most of your school, so you should probably be knowledgeable about them and be able to speak to which ones you may be interested in and why (hint, hint).