Stanford
Engineering
Spotlight

Tyler Cloyd

’18, Mechanical Engineering
I’ve been told that the professional work environment will be very different from school, but it’s hard to have a concrete understanding of that until you are accustomed to working full time.

As someone who is interested in career advancement, I appreciate that #ENGR193 builds some awareness of the issues that I have not yet encountered through summer work experiences, but I might face as I leave Stanford. One of the things the class has prompted me to think about is how I’ll establish metrics for myself on a team and how I’ll communicate about these metrics to my future colleagues.

In college, the metrics are obvious and established – complete your coursework, do well on exams. In the workplace, I get the sense that metrics of success as well as how those metrics get defined will vary from team to team. This is just one of the many workplace dynamics we’ve discussed in the course and which has not been an emphasis in more technical classes I’ve taken at Stanford.

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