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Grad School Career Plans

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Submitted By dotsonna
Words 2010
Pages 9
How will the MBA program fit with my career plans?

My career at IBM has taken a seemingly planned path to bring me where I am today with the corporation. In reality, my career has been a mix of exact choices, hard work, and a bit of surprise.

I began my career at IBM in May of 2004 after receiving my Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Michigan State University. I was hired into a technical role as a circuit design engineer working on microprocessor design for IBM’s mainframe System Z servers. The opportunity to design and contribute as a member of a world-class design team was both extremely exciting and intimidating. The engineers at IBM are the best in the industry and many have made IBM their home for entire careers; I immediately set a goal to become a key contributor to the team while striving to learn as much as possible from my mentors and colleagues. My first mentor within the company gave me a piece of advice, he said:

“Take every opportunity presented to you, large or small, and also be a team player”

I took this to heart and made this a driving force in my career. This led me very quickly from an entry-level engineer in my first project to a unit and team lead a couple of years later.

New pathways continued to present themselves and I jumped at each challenge with enthusiasm as my mentor’s advice echoed in my mind. I was afforded the opportunity to not only deliver on known work assignments, but also the opportunity to pick up additional tasks that added high value to IBM and the design team. One defining moment came in 2008 when I volunteered to travel on short term assignment to Bangalore India in order to help establish and to educate a brand new design center and team for microprocessor design within IBM. This assignment afforded me the chance to work with a talented new team, and also

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