Vidya Srinivasan

I would definitely say that I'm still trying to build my success, so I don't know if I've gotten to that point where I can say I've fully arrived, but I have huge support when it comes to me trying to go and get something. Family is something that has always been a big backbone for me, and I fall on them for support constantly. I'm a nervous Nellie, although I don't sound like one. I always second-guess myself and have a lot of self-doubt, so I always have that one person with me who's telling me, no, you don't suck, you can just go forward, push forward. That has been something that I definitely attribute my success to personally. Professionally, I would say that I'm a talker. I rely on conversations so much to resovle anything and everything. So I think I attribute my success to a little bit of both, that personal support system and my ability to communicate and work through problems by talking them through.

The best career advice I've ever received is to stop second-guessing myself and just go for it. There are a lot of people who look at you and see how great you are, and you need to really stop and tell that to yourself. You need to say to yourself, I think you're just going to do well. I used to second-guess myself a lot, and receiving this advice has been transformative for me. I'm slowly starting to internalize it and apply it, but I know I'll get there one day. It's about recognizing your own worth and not letting self-doubt hold you back from opportunities.

The first thing I would say is explore all the paths as much as possible. Industrial engineering is so wide-ranging and huge. We think about just supply chains, we think about just logistics, we think about one section at a time, and we're like, oh, this is where the opportunity is. No, it's just a world of opportunity. The best part about being an industrial engineer is it's needed everywhere. It's needed if you're a part of an arts council, it's needed if you're a part of healthcare, it's needed if you're in an AI company. It doesn't matter where you are, industrial engineering conversations, the need, the concepts are existing every single place. So explore that as much as possible. Don't just get bogged down or restrict yourself to just, oh, I need to just go into supply chain. Think about the impact of, or the opportunities it brings when we're thinking about the different sections of industrial engineering, and go into those niches. I think it'll be very surprising what you discover.

I think it's the race between how do we use AI the right way. It's a big blessing that we have in front of us. I think it's amazing, the opportunities that it brings with it. It's massive, and we're probably just scratching the surface with it. I'd love to be able to be a part of that race that explores that. But while I say that, there's also the question of are we using this the right way? It's one thing to use it to move fast, it's one thing to use it for research, but is it being used the right way to also curb creativity? When we're thinking about how innovative are we getting, are we just asking it to give us ideas, or are we asking it to build upon ideas we have in our thoughts? I think we need to use it as an aid for creativity and for innovation. Specifically in industrial engineering or from a supply chain perspective, it is going to be an amazing tool that's going to help us move really fast when we're doing some of these big analyses that we have to do. We work with data every single day. I think from that perspective, it's going to be great, but from a perspective where you're going to think about innovation or real-time creative thoughts, I think that's where we need to probably think hard and draw a line.

In both my work and personal life, I value integrity above all else. Whatever decision you take, you have to be true to yourself. Make sure that you never lose that integrity. Make sure that you don't lose the beliefs for yourself. At work, I believe in a 100% professional environment, but for me, all of that is possible if you have a little bit of humor and wit, and you know, trying to make your day easy. I always look for those tiny spots where I can laugh it up, or think about a memory which maybe it was a really complicated problem, but I was able to get past it because there was something that happened that made me laugh or chuckle. I think about those kinds of perspectives, but for me, first comes integrity. You've got to always have that. There's nothing that can replace that, but I think some amount of wit and humor can make your life easy every single day.