Rebecca Halverson was at a turning point in her career at John Deere. She had moved through a few departments before taking a managerial role in sensors and hardware. While her background in materials sciences and engineering prepared her for the technical parts of the job, she was trying to grow her leadership skills at the same time. “I realized that without advancements in my tools to collect information on how things fit together, I wasn’t going to be able to make bold shifts into new areas of the organization without some struggles,” she said.
Fortunately for Rebecca, John Deere has a longstanding relationship with the graduate certificate program at MIT SDM. The one-year certificate in systems and product development allows mid-career professionals to take the integrated core class alongside master’s students, learning the same systems principles while continuing to work full-time.
Rebecca talked with graduates of the certificate program at John Deere and felt that the program was exactly what she needed to expand her toolbox. The blend of systems engineering, system architecture, and project management taught her how to approach a complex system with an organizational and strategic mindset.
Certificate students take the class at a distance, participating in lectures and group projects online and coming to campus for a few weeks over the course of the year. Attending class while continuing to work full-time at John Deere allowed Rebecca to immediately put into practice what she was learning in class. “My intention was to come up with a strategy of how my team could better sit within the organization, but then also interact amongst themselves. I used some of the tools from class to help architect our group.” The ability to look at a system overall while not losing sight of its individual parts was crucial to her work, both at the time and after completing the program.
Rebecca found that being a distance student had its own pros and cons. The flexibility that allowed her to attend class while continuing to live and work in Iowa was crucial. And while she missed some on-campus opportunities, she found that her fellow students really made an effort to create connections within their cohort. Similarly, while balancing work and school required some flexibility from her family, it was only for one year. This also gave her the chance to show her two daughters that learning could be a continued endeavor through their lives – and an example of why it was important for them to study hard and do well in school!
Now that Rebecca has completed the graduate certificate, she’s working for Deere’s Intelligent Solutions Group in São Paulo, Brazil, as a group engineering manager. “I’m using the tools to get a handle on how this team fits within the ecosystem,” she says. Now that she’s in a very different setting and working with new teams she’s asking the same questions that she learned to ask in the core class. “How do I break this thing down? How do I make sure that I understand all the pieces? And then how do I build that back up again in a meaningful way?” She’s also found that other graduate certificate alums are working to bring training in systems engineering to the Brazil team.
In her work, Rebecca found that not only did she learn useful tools and techniques like iteration and decomposition, but she also had valuable experiences with her fellow SDM students. While her colleagues at John Deere have a similar thought process, learning from her classmates in other fields led her to challenge those assumptions. Ultimately, she’s grateful to have had the opportunity to study at MIT with the flexibility the graduate certificate allowed. “I could put aside that one year and make it happen without having to uproot my life to go do something amazing.”
