B-E-T students share experiences, insights at meet and greet event

The Auburn University Thomas Walter Center for Technology Management recently hosted a meet and greet event for new students entering the Business-Engineering-Technology (B-E-T) minor program.

The B-E-T minor is a blend of engineering and business courses open to all business and engineering majors. The program educates and trains students to develop new products, business models and business startups while working in a team environment.

Throughout the event, current and past B-E-T students mingled with incoming students and offered advice and feedback to the new students.

Jane Nurre, a junior studying marketing, has been in the B-E-T program for two semesters. When searching to add a minor to her studies, Nurre said the B-E-T program appealed to her because she is interested in pursuing a career in medical device sales. She knew delving deeper into product development would give her a competitive advantage.

During spring semester, Nurre was part of a group B-E-T project that partnered with the Auburn University Edward Via College of Osteopathic Medicine.

“We created a 3D-printed elbow, which is really cool,” Nurre said. “Through this program, I have had the opportunity to create new products and turn them into businesses, which I have really enjoyed.”

Jonathan Dinkel, a recent graduate from the Industrial and Systems Engineering Master of Engineering Management program, earned a B-E-T minor during his undergraduate industrial and systems engineering studies. He said the B-E-T program is unique because it brings business and engineering students together.

“It’s very heavy on project-based work, and it takes the strengths of both of those entirely separate colleges and fuses them to create a product that you can take to market and sell to people and ultimately make people’s lives better,” he said.

Dinkel recently accepted a job with the Joshua Tree Group in Franklin, Tennessee. He will work as a staff consultant performing project-based work.

“This job is almost a continuation of my industrial engineering projects, B-E-T projects, everything that I loved about my college experience,” he said. “Merging the different skills of a team is the biggest asset that the B-E-T program has prepared me for.”

Hanna Helme, a freshman studying electrical engineering, was recently accepted into the program. She said she was looking for a minor that would go beyond the technical side of engineering.

“Electrical is very specific to the job itself, so very math and science-based,” she said. “I was looking for something that would round out my skills when it came to business, such as working with teams and learning how product development works.”

Helme added that she is most looking forward to working in the Auburn University Makerspace, a hands-on workshop in the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering’s Brown-Kopel Student Achievement Center.

“It’ll be such a great opportunity to learn how to work with my hands to create projects,” she said.

Established in 1989 through a gift from the Ross Perot Foundation in honor of the center’s namesake, the Thomas Walter Center for Technology Management’s mission is to train engineering and business students in common programs and to study and improve solutions at the interface between the two disciplines.

The B-E-T minor is particularly useful to engineering students seeking business knowledge or a business student seeking a foundation of engineering concepts. A student can earn the B-E-T minor by earning 16 credits over four semesters. For more information about the program, visit aub.ie/bet.