The Inside Scoop on Duke’s Master of Engineering Management (MEM) [Episode 564]

Admissions Straight Talk

Show SummaryAre you an engineer who wants to use your technical skills and move into an entrepreneurial or managerial role? Well, Duke's Master of Engineering Management or MEM may be just the ticket for you, and it provides two options, on campus and online. The program has been around for over 25 years and aims to prepare engineers with business knowledge. Luis Morales, Executive Director of the program, shares more of what the program offers and how applicants can successfully present themselves. Show NotesWelcome to the 564th episode of Admissions Straight Talk. Thanks for joining me. Before we dive into today's interview, I want to mention a free resource at Accepted that can benefit you if you are applying to graduate engineering programs and that is Applying to Graduate Engineering Programs: What You Need to Know. It can guide you through a process you've never been through before. It's not the same as applying to college. Download your complimentary copy at accepted.com/564download. Our guest today is Luis Morales, Executive Director of the Master of Engineering Management Program at Duke University. Professor Morales earned his bachelor's in electrical engineering from the University of Puerto Rico and his master's of engineering from Cornell University. He then worked as an engineer and manager at AT&T and at Cisco before joining Duke as an executive in residence and adjunct associate professor at Duke's Pratt School of Engineering, while also founding his own consulting company. He became the executive director of the MEM program in 2021 and also teaches three courses in that program.Professor Morales, welcome to Admissions Straight Talk. [2:00]Thank you, Linda. It's a pleasure to be here.Can we start with an overview of the Master of Engineering Management program at Duke? Who is it for? What need is it intended to fill? [2:06]Absolutely. So the Duke MEM program has been around for more than 25 years. In fact, last year we were celebrating our 25th year anniversary, and as I look back at the charter of the program back then in 1997, the purpose was to prepare engineers with business knowledge. So the assessment, Linda, at the time was that we were preparing engineers for industry, for the global economy that did not have the necessary business knowledge. So they were not able to either get an impact, have an impact on the business side of companies right away so that's exactly the need that we're trying to satisfy.And if you think back to if that was the need then, and you look at where we are now as technology has become so pervasive across so much of how we as a society generate value, engineering management, to me is the perfect solution because it combines, again, it builds on a base of technical knowledge, but then it builds business knowledge on top of that. So the basic structure of the program is eight courses, four of which are core, focus on management, people management, intellectual property management, marketing and finance. Then the other four are technical electives designed to basically sharpen your STEM, saw, whether it is product management, data science, software management, et cetera.There are two versions of the MEM program. There's the online and the in-residence. Can you go over how they're structured? [4:40]Absolutely. So the campus program, as I mentioned before, has been around for more than 25 years. Our online offering is going to be 15 years in September. Yeah, the time flies. There are a lot of similarities between the two in terms of courses. The curriculum is the same, core courses, f

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