Hello everyone, and welcome to Professional Development For Industrial Engineers (PDF-INDY).
Welcome!
This new group is built to connect students currently on their Professional Experience Year (PEY) with lower-year students who are still navigating their paths. Our motivation is simple: to offer practical advice, share technical skills, and provide guidance based on real-world experience.
Our Mission
As an Industrial Engineering student, I’ve always found our discipline to be incredibly flexible. But with that flexibility comes an overwhelming number of options.
My hope is to create a space where we can:
- Learn practical, career-focused technical skills that might not be taught in class.
- Gain honest insight into what different career paths really look like.
Unlike clubs focused specifically on Industrial Engineering careers (like IISE), our goal is to cover as wide a range of career paths as possible. This group isn’t just for Industrial Engineering students; We just named it PDF-INDY because we’re in Industrial Engineering. We welcome students from all disciplines who are looking to explore their options, especially for PEY.
How We’re Different
We’re not a traditional club. There are no formal positions. Think of this as a semester-long workshop series where we all share information and learn from each other. We also plan to be pretty consistent.
- Anyone Can Lead: I will be organizing some sessions, but anyone who wants to present can present. If you have a topic you’re passionate about and are prepared to share, please reach out to me. All schedules are tentative.
- Project Feedback: We want to encourage personal projects. At the end of each session, we’ll set aside time for peer-to-peer feedback. It’s a great opportunity to get new perspectives on your work and help others with theirs.
Proposed Schedule & Format
We plan to run sessions roughly every 3 weeks, alternating between technical workshops and guest speaker sessions.
Each meeting will take place online (depending on number of participants) and will be about 60 minutes:
- 30-40 minutes: Main workshop or speaker presentation.
- 20-30 minutes: Open Q&A and project feedback.
Here is a tentative schedule for our first semester:
- Week 1: Technical Workshop: Intro to the Shell, Git/GitHub, and NumPy
- Week 2: PEY Speaker: Experience at EY
- Week 3: Technical Workshop: Intro to Docker, Dev Containers, GPU Compute (RunPods)
- Week 4: PEY Speaker: Experience at CIBC
- Week 5: Technical Workshop: Intro to CI/CD with Pytest and GitHub Actions
- Week 6: PEY Speaker: TBD
- Week 7: Technical Workshop: Implementing Papers from Scratch (ResNet)
- Week 8: PEY Speaker: TBD
This is the first semester we’re running this, so there may be hiccups. We’re excited to iterate, improve, and build this community with you to offer the best guidance we can.
Thanks for reading!