Gree
tings and congrats on your acceptance to the Johnson School!My name is Alex Woodcock and I’m a first year currently taking the Semester in Strategic Operations immersion. Prior to business school I worked for John Hancock in Boston in Long Term Care insurance and portfolio management. One of the main reasons I came to Johnson was the opportunity to take the SSO immersion. I wanted to make the transition from financial services into consulting and thought I should address one of my shortcomings by focusing on operations. Needless to say it’s been a great learning opportunity and an intense semester. Unlike many of the immersions we have two faculty members and a PhD student who are fully committed to teaching class: Jan Suwinski, who seems to have several hundred years of industry experience and sits on the board of many of the companies we visit, Nagesh Gavirneni, who has been taking a larger and larger role in the class and who previously worked for Schlumberger, and Mike Dixon, who is our service operation specialist and is finishing his PhD at Cornell. Also we typically have students from the ILR school and the engineering school who take classes with us and make up about 15% of our class. It’s great to get their experience and contrast their knowledge with our education from the Johnson school.
However, the highlight of the immersion is the 4 immersion treks we take to various companies. So far this year I’ve been on treks to 11 companies: Kionix (a maker of accelerometers – they go in Nintendo Wii’s and airbags), Kane is Able (a logistics company), Cigna (we saw their claims and call center), Amazon (we went to one of their distribution centers), ABB Instrumentation, Trane (furnaces and air conditioners), Sikorsky (commercial helicopters), Guardian Glass, SentrySafe, General Mills, and Moog. Typically a site visit consists of an introduction, a site tour, and then a Q&A session with the senior leadership. While we learn a lot in the classroom it’s a more valuable experience to see how these companies run their operations and get that real world perspective. The level of access that we gain is amazing – the faculty does a great job getting us access to such a broad range of companies. On Thursday I was in Guardian Glass and got to walk through a float glass manufacturing facility. Watching the process of turning sand into glass was pretty crazy – the furnace is 4 stories tall and never turns off since it takes 30 days to get up to temperature. Then on Friday we went to a General Mills plant in Buffalo. Who knew that Cheerios are processed one O at a time through a gun that shoots them at over 300 mph. Yeah, you get to see a lot of cool things.
Feel free to reach out to me with any questions about the immersion and I look forward to meeting you at Destination Johnson.
-Alex Woodcock
Class of 2011
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