Name: Ines GuinardClass: Senior
Sport: Women's Tennis
Major: Industrial and Systems Engineering
GPA: 3.7
Aubrey Kragen (AK): Can you describe the Industrial and Systems Engineering major and what most people do with that degree when they graduate?
Ines Guinard (IG): The main focus is to optimize a system. And you can define a system in many ways. Your system could be an entire manufacturing plant, so how can you make a piece of machinery most efficiently and with the fewest number of errors? Or you can look at software as your system and see how you can run it faster, error-free. So the underlying concept is optimization of a system.
AK: How did you become interested in this subject?
IG: In school, I was always good at math and enjoyed it. I was always a numbers person, and I wanted something that let you be creative while you were working with numbers. And engineering kind of has that builders' 'You can create what you want' mentality. In terms of industrial and systems within the engineering majors, it's probably the most broad in terms of what you can apply it to. I enjoy that because I wasn't a person who grew up and wanted to build cars like mechanical engineers -- I didn't know from the start. So that's why I picked industrial engineering specifically. I started as a biomedical engineer. I did research at UC Davis in high school and I was in the biomedical department there, doing tissue engineering, so for the meniscus and for the TMJ disc. I got into that through the sports appeal, and I loved the medical device side of it and kind of quickly realized that the biological and chemical aspect of it didn't really appeal to me as much. So I switched out after a semester and at that point it was either mechanical engineering or industrial, and I didn't want to pigeonhole myself into one area.
AK: It sounds like you were ahead of the game in high school, working on a college campus, and it helped you earn a Trustee Scholarship. What did that process entail?
IG: In terms of getting the scholarship, the process is just applying before Dec. 1 to be considered for a merit scholarship and then you receive a notification that you've been nominated. I was actually nominated for the Presidential Scholarship (half tuition), and then you come in and do a full day of interviews with different people. Then, through my interviews, I actually got bumped up to a Trustee Scholar. So that was exciting. I'm a Merit Research Scholar here, too. I think there are like 12 of us per year, so it's a pretty small group, and it's basically you get $3,000 of grant money to put towards undergraduate research ... I spent a couple years doing research on cancer metastasis in aerospace and mechanical engineering. This one was building mathematical and computational models of cancer metastasis, so how it spreads from one part of the body to another site, and basically using probability and math to predict that.
AK: It sounds like you have experience in a lot of different areas. How did everything come together to help you choose the job offer you just accepted upon graduation?
IG: The general theme has been that ability to be creative and not be pigeonholed in one area. So cancer sounds very medical-related, but really I was building mathematical models and coding, so that's a skill that can be applied anywhere. Same thing with industrial engineering. The other piece that I thought was missing from the puzzle was finance, because I thought it would be interesting to go into my own business venture sometime, and if you understand both the engineering and the finance, I think that puts you at an advantage. My older brother went into investment banking, and I learned about it through him. So my freshman summer, I did my first internship in Houston in oil and gas investment banking. I really enjoyed it, but I didn't want to be in oil and gas. I worked for Bank of America in New York my sophomore summer in financial sponsors ... and then I did the same thing in San Francisco this past summer, where I accepted my job ultimately.
AK: You've worked in a bunch of different cities and lived in different countries --- how has that influenced who you are as a person?
IG: That's one of the things I'm most grateful for. My mom's Spanish, my dad's French, so they embraced the aspect of being able to speak multiple languages and call multiple places home. That's helped me in being part of a team, being a leader and communicating with people from different backgrounds, whether it's with engineers or finance people or people in a completely different industry. I've definitely taken all those experiences in and applied them to my school setting, tennis and work.
AK: This is your first year on the tennis team, right? When and how did you become a member of the team?
IG: I started playing tennis when I was eight. I did the whole junior circuit, I played several hours a day growing up, and then when I got to college, I felt like if I wanted to do engineering and wanted to do it really well, it was going to require a lot of time. But I loved the sport, so I kept playing three or four days a week. This fall, Richard Gallien saw me hitting and came up to me, and the first step was having me be a point of contact for the girls if they wanted someone to hit with on outside hours. About a month later, West Nott and Zoe Scandalis, our two assistant coaches, saw me again and had me hit with Zoe. They started asking more questions and right away said, 'I think we need her on the team.' The next day, I got a call in the morning to come in, and by that afternoon I had signed everything and was on board. It was super special and I'm super excited about it. The beauty of it is that the one thing that was kind of missing from my college experience in terms of the things I love, was tennis. So I couldn't be happier about it.
