8/11/2021 Julia Park
Written by Julia Park
Although MechSE alumna Megan Glaeser (BSME ’20) graduated just a year ago, her affinity for MechSE and her constant desire to learn and understand her world led her back to UIUC to enter the Master of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering (M.Eng.ME) degree program.
“Graduating with my bachelor’s degree from Illinois was a great feeling and a great accomplishment, but I couldn't help but feel nostalgic about leaving my time in MechSE behind. As good as it felt to take my last final and know that I was done with my education, I wasn't quite satisfied. I realized that I didn't want to be done learning yet,” Glaeser said. She applied for and enrolled in the program in Fall 2020.
Glaeser is in the M.Eng.ME program’s “Energy” track, which involves classes that are all about her passion and career. “I get to pick classes that will help me with my job while also giving me a much deeper understanding of energy in both a theoretical and practical sense. It’s really satisfying to be able to directly apply concepts from the classroom to the real world, and that's exactly what the M.Eng.ME program gears students up to do,” she said. She expects to complete her degree in May 2023 as she takes classes part-time and works full-time.
For the last six months, Glaeser has been employed with Burns & McDonnell in Chicago, an engineering consulting company that works in many different industries providing engineering, design, and construction management services to clients. She works in the Energy Global Practice where their primary clients are electric utilities across the Midwest. Glaeser said her role as an Assistant Mechanical Engineer has her conducting engineering design and calculations for projects such as building new, upgrading existing, or decommissioning old power plants.
“The project I’m working on right now is a “coal to gas conversion” project, where we are retrofitting an old coal plant to be able to fire natural gas. This type of project is becoming very common across the U.S. as utilities work toward lowering emissions while still providing reliable electricity to customers,” Glaeser said.
As a mechanical engineering undergraduate, Glaeser also minored in the Hoeft Technology and Management Program, a cross-disciplinary program between Gies Business and Grainger Engineering. She said the program exposed her to the world outside of engineering and taught her how to function well in a multi-disciplinary environment, helping to ensure that, as a successful engineer, she is able to collaborate with colleagues from a wide range of disciplines to complete a common goal. The program also showed her the many career paths that were waiting for her after graduation, which helped her realize her passion for the energy industry.
Glaeser said that, like many of her undergrad classmates, she had often wondered if everything she was learning in her engineering courses would really be useful in her career later. It turns out it is.
“After only six months in my job, I can say that every single class I took has been applicable to the engineering I do now. I'm constantly Googling equations that I recall and pulling textbooks off the shelf to reread certain concepts or find that one property I need to reference to complete my design. Every class you take during school will give you another set of valuable tools that will help you become a great engineer someday, and I am so proud that my tools came from Illinois MechSE and M.Eng. When you are designing something real and tangible that will affect millions of people’s lives someday (like a 600 MW power plant, for instance), you only want the highest quality tools in your set, and Illinois Engineering most certainly gives those to you.”