Jason D. Park

Jason D. Park '06

I am a management development candidate ("M.D.") at the Chicago headquarters of McMaster-Carr, a global industrial distribution company. In my starting role, I spend about half of my time solving economic problems in managing our inventory, such as deciding how much of a particular item to stock in our five U.S. warehouses given an uncertain item demand forecast, different storage spacing restrictions across warehouses, and unwieldy supplier production regulations. With the remainder of my time, I am expected to initiate projects to make the aforementioned process more efficient. This variety of analytical work is designed to prepare an M.D. to become a team manager in an operational department within about a year.

Looking back, sociology was great preparation for work in business because, at its core, the discipline is about mastering rigorous tools for quantitative and qualitative analysis of real world data—tools which any corporate recruiter will tell you are fundamental to any business job. In addition, the approaches to understanding people and groups that I learned in the concentration, especially in my senior thesis on organizational learning and change, have given me a solid base from which to develop as an effective
team manager.