MBA + MS Design Innovation (MMM Program)at the McCORMICK SCHOOL OF ENGINEERING and KELLOGG SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT

Why did you choose MMM?

I chose the MMM program because my career has been defined by navigating complex enterprise systems, and I realized that to lead in the current era of emerging AI, I needed to pair my business background with a formal foundation in design innovation.

Early in my career, I managed technology portfolios and led digital transformations where the primary challenge was aligning technical capabilities with human workflows. I saw firsthand how even a $300M portfolio can struggle if the interface between the data and the user isn't seamless. After going through trial by fire at a large enterprise financial firm, I wanted to get back into an environment that encouraged velocity, and as such, I moved into the cybersecurity startup space – an area that had benefited greatly from enterprise business going to the cloud because of COVID.  

However, the emergence of AI changed the stakes for how we build products, requiring us to moving beyond static automation to creating intuitive, agentic systems that users can trust. I chose MMM specifically because it allows me to earn an MBA while simultaneously pursuing an MS in Design Innovation. This dual focus gives me the strategic toolkit to drive commercial growth and the design-thinking framework to ensure that as AI becomes more pervasive, it remains human-centric and accessible. I’m at Kellogg and McCormick to master that balance between technical complexity and user-focused simplicity.

What is life like as a MMM student?

Life as a MMM student is organized chaos. Even with a set schedule, every week ebbs and flows with social activities from the broader Kellogg MBA ecosystem to impromptu MMM events. A typical day in my life looks like:

• Catching up on emails and missed messages. You are in so many different WhatsApp groups that you will be bombarded by 100+ messages over the course of an hour 24/7.
• Walking or biking to class in the morning
• Grabbing coffee or lunch with friends
• Working on my startup/side project – I haven’t decided yet but always building something
• Going to club meetings or night classes
• Hosting a small group dinner, game night, hanging out with a friend

There is no down time when you’re a MMM with social, academic, and extracurricular commitments but it is incredibly rewarding.

What have you loved about your MMM experience?

From an academic standpoint, you get the best of both worlds of a graduate engineering and business degree. The courses are intellectually stimulating with world-class educators who are either at the cutting edge of their field in terms of research or are practitioners who have lived and breathed the course materials they are teaching – as they say, context is key. One of the things I have found extremely refreshing is the timeliness and inclusion of current events in course materials. There will be some breaking news on a Monday night and by a Tuesday morning class, the professors will have incorporated it into their lectures as a means of teaching us how frameworks work, or don’t work, in real life.

 From a social standpoint, having a close-knit cohort of ~60 students within the sprawl that is graduate school is extremely valuable. The fact that MMMs start a quarter early during the summer is invaluable as we have an established cohort of people we know will have our backs. The MMM admissions council does a fantastic job of admitting people from all geographical, career, and personality backgrounds and that brings in fresh and different perspectives that have been very humbling.