What I Did With My EMP Degree: Alumni share their career paths

Irene Diep works for one of the world’s largest and most recognizable brands, PepsiCo. Throughout a decade of experience in manufacturing engineering, she’s held a variety of operations and supply chain management positions with the multinational food and beverage company.

As the Director of Engineering for the City of Richardson, Texas, Shawn Poe is responsible for many of the civil engineering projects that keep the city running smoothly. It’s a job where Poe constantly draws on his 26 years of experience in civil engineering and the management and leadership skills he developed in the Master of Engineering in Engineering Management degree (EMP) Program at CU Boulder.

The sky is no longer the limit for engineers with the right degree under their belts. With a bachelor’s in aerospace engineering, Josh Lawrence's career was already taking off at Lockheed Martin, where he successfully landed his first job out of college as a systems engineer at its satellite operations facility in Colorado. However, after graduating from CU Boulder’s Master of Engineering in Engineering Management Program (EMP), Lawrence’s career as an aerospace engineer reached a much higher orbit.

Hamad Yazdi’s path to success in the field of enterprise software sales has taken him from his hometown of Boulder, Colorado to schools and countries around the world and back again. And his story goes to show that there’s never just one way to earn a master’s degree — or use engineering management skills.

As an undergraduate student studying mechanical engineering, Daniel Broe knew that he would eventually have to study for an advanced degree if he was going to differentiate himself from all of the other engineers graduating around the same time—and progress into a leadership position.