Common Ground Essay

Common Ground Essay

Zhonghao Li

BIS 301

My two concentrations are Math and Engineering Management, which could be integrated in countless ties and applied to the career goal I want to achieve in the future.

The first career goal I want to achieve is being a Product Manager of an automotive company. Firstly, being a manager means I will be running and leading a group of people. There are differences between leading people and being employed. For instance, leaders have responsibilities to coach and develop their subordinates, fix problems and lead the group. From my Engineering Administration class I could learn the skills need to analyze the situations of an organization and how to measure the value of a company. For instance, SWOT analysis is the basic analyzing skill used to see the situation from both internally and externally, it analyzes the Strength, weakness from inside of the company or group and simultaneously Opportunities and Threads from outside causes. It not only provides the analysis of the situation but also taught me how to see the situation with different angle of views to find the best solution to the problem or the correct path to follow. However, thinking with different angles didn’t start with the engineering management class, it actually inspired me first in math. Gauss Theorem is one of the most famous theories in the whole mathematic history. When calculating the sum of an arithmetic progression, especially a long list of numbers, it will be nearly impossible to make the calculation with the traditional and regular way. “The most famous anecdote of young Gauss is the time he found the shortcut for calculating the sum of an arithmetic progression at the tender age of 10. The anecdote involves his schoolteacher who wanted to take a rest and asked the students to sum the integers from 1 to 100 as busy work. After a few seconds, the teacher saw Gauss sitting idle. When asked why he was not frantically doing addition, Gauss quickly replied that the sum was 5050. His classmates and teacher were astonished, and Gauss ended up being the only pupil to calculate the correct answer.” His teacher and the rest of the world were amazed by his calculation. He found that the sum of the first and last integers is the same as the sum of second and last but one, same applies to all the rest pairs in the list. So he just took the sum of the first and last integers, times the number of pairs which equals half of the number of integers in the list and he got the correct answer. That’s one of the simple examples from Gauss Theorem but it really inspired me to think and resolve problems with different point of view or other angles. Also in geometry I learned, when calculating an angle of an irregular polygon, it’s usually hard to calculate every single angle in the polygon. I remember one time I had one more angle left to calculate, I couldn’t solve it however I tried. Suddenly a thought came into my mind, why not subtract the sum of the rest of angles from the total of 720°? I was suddenly enlightened. It might not be the perfect example but it really inspired me to think differently than the regular methods. In the area of running business or group of people, I learned to think outside the box when facing problems. The career goal I want to achieve was being a product manager of automotive company. It is a position required to think more with the angle as users other than engineers and find ways to progress the products and provide possible solutions with the perspectives of engineers. For instance with the development of technology used in vehicles, car companies started to simplify the dash and center control panel, centralize all the features and functions into the big control panel screen to look better and with more sense of high-tech. This is the perspective of engineers in every automotive company and undeniable it will be the trend of interior design in the future. However as the product manager, I have to think from the point of using it as regular millions of users other than engineers who design it. Is the touch-controlled dash really user friendly? Or it’s just look better by compromising the user experiences and ease. The very first purpose of vehicles is to make it easy to use safely and easily and then make it look better without compromising any factor which could affect safety. From the view of users, it’s not like smart phones, the rotary knob is always easier and safer to use on a car when driving than touching the screen. That would not be the concerns of an engineer but that’s exactly the way to find problems and improvements for product managers. Product managers are the ones who see the products with the angle of both engineers and users. So the integration of mathematical thinking and managing engineers will be applied in the career I’m looking into.

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