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本帖最后由 shawnwu0712 于 2014-10-14 14:23 编辑
Personal Statement-Industrial Engineering
This October, workers at Foxconn protested the industrial engineers’ optimization that made them get less pay due to the decrease of overtime. This news drew my attention, for me, a future industrial engineer, the key responsibility is to choose the best practice both good for workers and employers after negotiating with both sides, and in addition, I do care for well-designed products that can better user experience. Based on what I am interested, I would like to peruse a master’s degree in industrial engineering at ____University. My undergraduate study during which I excelled in changing coursework, engaged in researches in interface design, and extended knowledge outside the realm of my syllabus is what has set me on this path.
I sought opportunities for independent study in order to gain comprehensive understanding of user experience and to have more direct contact with my professors. The 6th semester, Professor Who was once a professor at Purdue University, taught me Human Computer Interface, Inspired by what I had learned at this course, I with my teammates conducted a teamwork about optimizing the ATM interface. Firstly, it was vital to know what consumers want, based on the marketing strategies I had obtained during my exchange program to Hong Kong X University where I intentionally made use of my time to attend marketing-related courses and read various works on marketing theories to accumulate related knowledge, I conducted researches using one-on-one interviews, questionnaires, and direct observations to know what functions of ATM were used most frequently, then searching varieties of resources, finally concluding the reading habits of Chinese, who prefer reading from left to right and top to bottom. I proposed to highlight the “Inquiry” and “Withdrawal” buttons and place them on the top left corner to save time. Through actual usage test involving 100 volunteers of different age groups, it had obviously been proved valid.This process helped me how to design a research, how to collect resources, how to conduct a research step by step, and how to choose proper experiments to verify the research.
The internship in Johnson Controls honed the skills to select the best optimization both for workers and employers. There I was involved with two projects. One of them was to optimize the lifting tasks. Workers had to lift the seats from another assembly lines to main assembly line, evaluating the frequency of lifting, the total lifting times, the weight of the seats and the angle of waist movement ,this lifting task was at great risk of injuring workers, so it is changed to use slots to move between two parallel assembly lines, therefore, the workers suffer much less; for the employers, the Lost Time Accident rate drops, but the total productivity increased. Another optimization was to change the layout of the assembly lines and material areas by aligning them in a vertical way, thus, materials handing between two areas can be replaced by electric rail cars instead of using workers to transport the materials. Therefore the level production could be achieved; besides, previous waist injuries of workers caused by pulling material cars no longer exist. Those improvements were achieved after taking with workers and consulting engineers and managers, both sides agreed the optimization which ameliorated the working environment and also promoted the productivity.
After three years’ course study and the experience I gained during the internship, I found what I learned is too general and graduate school will give me this opportunity to equip me with adequate academic research experiences to self-verify the optimization and the applications of well-designed products were appropriate. In graduate school, I will focus on optimization, interface design, and human factor engineering. By emerging myself in the rigorous but innovative academic air of your University, I expect to further develop qualities of tenacity, carefulness, prudence and patience to shape me more for the industry. In the future, I wish I could devote more to optimize the situations both work for the employers and workers, especially promoting the working environment, during my internship, I saw some injuries that could be avoid by tailoring existing process or improving current designs but still were ignored, I do know what workers suffer; also, I do care for improving user experience by design better products.
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