BS, Aerospace Engineering
“When I first came to MIT, I wanted to do something big,” says Jesse Adler ’17. “For me at the time, that meant working for an organization like Apple or SpaceX on technology that had a significant global impact. Thanks to GEL, I got the chance to do both.”
A native Aussie, Jesse’s first visit to the United States was for his MIT orientation. He quickly found a home in the community: competing on the crew team, performing a cappella, and diving into aerospace engineering. It was his classmates and teammates who recommended GEL to him. “Everyone told me, ‘If you want to be a leader, you need to do GEL.’” And so that’s what he did.
For Jesse, Engineering Leadership Labs were revelatory. “There’s a limit to what you can accomplish in a classroom setting,” he explains, “but the practical experiences, schema, theories, and way of thinking that GEL imparted could very easily apply in any number of other contexts. It was wildly fantastic.” To this day, he continues to refer back to the Capabilities of Effective Engineering Leaders when making tough decisions. “In school, your questions all have answers. In the real world, you need to learn to make decisions when the outcomes are uncertain. To teach students in a classroom environment that the world is actually a very uncertain place is challenging but critical.”
After MIT, Jesse went to work at Apple on the team manufacturing iPhones. He recalls one very specific occasion where he was forced to make a decision in the face of uncertainty. “We heard that there was a quality assurance issue with one of our parts, and we needed to decide if we were going to continue manufacturing or put production on hold while the issue was investigated. I was on the phone with members of my team trying to determine if 80,000 people were going to come to work that day.” Thanks to GEL, he was prepared to handle that situation.