Over the past year, Sugee Kim has been working part-time on her Master of Science in Technology Management degree at Columbia, while working full-time. In March, she started a new role at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), an opportunity she landed with help from professors in the program. But Sugee didn’t start out with an eye toward the financial sector.
Sugee studied journalism as an undergraduate at NYU. After college she signed on with a startup, where she wore many hats. The small size of the company allowed her to learn a great deal about different sides of an information technology business.
“I joined a very small startup with no knowledge about technology or advertising at all. It was four of us in a room with no windows. We didn’t have money for a Product Manager. We didn’t have money for anything,” she said. “We sold the company three years later to a bigger company.”
She stayed on at that company for another few years on the advertising side before she started to worry she was in too much of a niche. “I began to feel a little pigeon-holed in terms of advertising because I had done it for such a long time,” she said, “but I knew being a developer and coding weren’t in my future.”
That’s when she decided to go back to school and found Columbia’s program in Technology Management. The diversity of the program from people at all stages of their careers was a major draw for her. “I also really like that all the courses were taught by professionals who were still actively working in their fields. I felt like that was really important for me,” she said.
In March, Sugee started working on the Expand Research team, a benchmarking arm of BCG, which was a role that she was initially hesitant about. “I don’t think I understood what working at BCG meant,” she said. Her professors, Doug Scherer and Craig Cuyar, gave her a lot of their time to talk her through the rigorous recruitment process at BCG, and also explained how the role could affect future hiring decisions for her. “They helped me gain a better understanding of what having a company like this on your résumé means to some people,” she said. “They pointed out what the positive implications of working there could be ten years down the road.”
For Sugee, Columbia’s program has been a gateway not just to new knowledge, but to a wealth of other boons. “I came into this program because I wanted to learn something else, and I ended up getting a new job through it, and also all these great resources,” she said. “So the biggest takeaway for me is that there are so many positive outcomes that came from this program. The byproduct of attending has been so much bigger than just increasing my knowledge of information technology.”
Learn more about the Master of Science in Technology Management.
