SDM Explained: A Transcript

What follows is an organized list of my coursework as part of SDM. The concept of "Systems Design and Management" can be hard to encapsulate in a simple sentence, so this exhaustive list can give you a better feel for how I have been applying myself for the last year and a half. The high-level themes provide the best feel for the SDM approach: leadership, the business of technology, and large-scale systems analysis. My personal area of interest is in the integration of renewable energy, visible both in the explicitly energy-related classes as well as the courses in which I performed substantial project work on energy issues. (Energy-focused courses are noted in bold.)

• Technology Strategy
  • 15.965 Technology Strategy - Creating and capturing value
  • 15.969 User-Centered Innovation - Listening to lead users for product design
  • ESD.945 SLaM Praxis - How decisions are made, frameworks for competitive analysis
  • ESD.58 Disruptive Technologies - How technologies evolve
    • Project: market evaluation of 3rd generation solar cells
  • ESD.945 SLaM Lab - Applied technology strategy
    • Project: New market penetration for an energy efficiency firm
• Management
  • 15.381 The Human Side of Technology - leadership theory as applied to tech
  • ESD.930 Leadership - leadership frameworks and personal reflection
  • ESD.38 Enterprise Architecture - an engineering approach to organizational transformation
  • 15.514 Managerial Accounting - how to think about costs and income
  • ESD.763 Supply Chain Management - treating a supply chain as an optimizable design
  • 15.281 Advanced Leadership Communication - running effective teams
  • HBS1929 Business Marketing - how to manage a team for b2b sales
    • Project on how to sell to electrical utilities
• Energy
  • 15.366 Energy Ventures - Practical lab in how to launch an energy-industry startup
  • ESD.940 Wind Turbine Design - manufacturing, meteorology, and the NREL FAST suite
  • ESD.934 Engineering, Economics, and Regulation of the Power Sector - grid operations
    • Project: future outlook for demand response
  • ESD.865 Modeling Electric Power Systems - numerical optimization with GAMS
  • Thesis - Demand Response for Grid Balance with High Renewable Penetration
• System Engineering
  • ESD.33 System Engineering - analyzed the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative as a large-scale systems problem
  • ESD.34 System Architecture - applied architectural principles to the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative
  • ESD.36 Project Management - how to bring in a project on time and on budget, using system dynamics to avoid the traps
  • ESD.344 Real Options - mathematical tools for when and how to build flexibility into product design
• Misc
  • ESD.301 Statistics - Emphasis on hypothesis testing
  • 21F.415 Deutschland im Europäischen Kontext - Deutsche Literatur auf Deutsch
  • 6.083 Mobile Application Development - Wrote 5 deployable Android applications

This portfolio of classes has positioned me for a role in product management, project management, corporate strategy, or engineering management.