Though she knew from the start of her time at Tech that she wanted to major in management, Allen Wang (BSM 2010) wasn’t sure exactly what she wanted out of her education until her sophomore year.

That's when she saw a flyer that said, “Bridging the Gap between Business and Engineering," advertising the start of the Denning Technology and Management Program. “I really wanted to get more exposure to the technical side of Georgia Tech, and this program offered it.”

Started in fall 2008, the program is a collaborative effort of the Colleges of Engineering and Management designed to prepare a new generation of leaders who possess both managerial and technological know-how.

The Technology and Management Program is open to both engineering and management majors who learn one another’s language through coursework in their respective fields as well as teamwork to solve real-world problems. Students enter the program at the start of their junior year and pursue a prescribed course of study while satisfying requirements for a bachelor’s degree in their engineering or management major. They all earn a minor in engineering and management.

The program helped Wang be in the right place at the right time – with the right skills – to get her career started at Siemens. During a business etiquette dinner for program participants, she sat with a corporate recruiter for Siemens. Though she learned that the company didn't have any internship openings outside of engineering, she employed her growing networking skills to converse and learn as much as she could about the company.

"The next day I got a congratulatory e-mail saying I'd made it to the second-round interview," remembers Wang, who didn't even realize the dinnertime conversation had been an interview. She got a summer/fall 2009 internship working in IT, the focus of her management studies. "It's all attributable to the Technology and Management Program, which gave me the opportunity and the communication skills to impress the recruiter."

After graduation in the spring, Wang returned to work full-time for Siemens in the highly prestigious IT Leadership Development Program.