Due to the focus of the Industrial Engineering coursework I completed at El Bosque University, I developed great interest in the fields of business, marketing and entrepreneurship. I had the fortune of creating projects that integrate and apply what I’ve learned in each course. For example, I led a feasibility study for a field project in a marketing course with a company located in Bogota, Colombia. As part of this project, I collected data resulting from a survey and interviews to learn as much as possible about the company’s customer base in order to support the development and launching of a new product. I found that there were several challenges to collecting quality and meaningful data, using analytics and getting reliable results. After hours of work, I was able to identify relevant variables by establishing clear objectives for the project, knowing the purpose of the survey and interview, deciding what to measure in correlation to them, crafting related questions and defining the target population to finally analyze them in IBM SPSS software.

I also accomplished a semester-long research project focused on implementing policies and procedures that are still in use today during my undergraduate internship as an industrial engineer. What I learn from this experience is to promote company ideas, improve my communication skills, and to present myself as a professional in a real-world environment.Despite of the fact that these projects began with an idea to apply academic principles to solve real-world problems, they also showed me the importance of generating and analyzing data quickly and accurately, safely handling a company’s sensitive information and building successful business strategies