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Nicole Dates ’23, MS ’24, was involved in several extracurricular organizations and did remarkable work during her time at ������ɫ’s industrial and systems engineering program. Her ambition has driven her to many accomplishments in her field.

In high school, engineering was a path that Dates didn’t imagine herself pursuing. It wasn’t until she was required to choose a class to fulfill an art and music elective that she began to explore her options.

“I wasn’t a very artistic or musically inclined person, so I took an engineering class,” Dates says. “At first, I was pretty intimidated by going into an engineering career, but after taking some time, I learned about a lot of different careers in engineering.”

Dates then discovered industrial and systems engineering, and she knew this would be her future career: “There are so many different career paths and companies you can work for. You can really do any kind of industry with that degree.”

Dates is passionate about ISE because she uses technical solutions to help improve people’s lives.

“The central theme is making jobs safer and more enjoyable for people, having a higher accuracy rate or having the lowest cost,” she says. “I work in manufacturing, so I’ve done many different projects for making safety improvements to help make associates’ lives better. It’s a rewarding career.”

Based on her hard work and achievements, Dates received the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Student Excellence last spring.

“It was such an honor to receive the award,” she says. “I couldn’t have done it without the support that I got from the School of Systems Science and Industrial Engineering. It’s exciting to look back on my time as a first-year student and being so worried about being successful in engineering, then seeing myself now with my master’s degree.”

Distinguished Professor Mohammad T. Khasawneh, director of the SSIE School, praises Dates and her love for helping others.

“Nicole is a true renaissance woman who is gifted in myriad ways and always has a free moment to help her peers and her community,” he says. “She is well-known to many on our campus and has consistently demonstrated a commitment to academic excellence. Nicole is a remarkable young professional and already accomplished leader with great things ahead of her. We are immensely proud of her and her many achievements.”

Throughout her undergraduate career, Dates was heavily involved in several organizations. She spent a lot of her time in the Society of Women Engineers (SWE), a group whose mission is to encourage women to meet their full potential in the engineering field. She served in leadership roles such as fundraising and treasurer. As a master’s student, she served as SWE’s graduate advisor.

“It’s a good group of women that you can confide in and find mentorship in,” she says. “As a first-year student, that was my introduction to professional development-type topics, so not only is it a social organization, but there’s that professional aspect of it as well.”

Another organization was the Institute of Industrial Systems Engineers (IISE), the world’s largest organization for ISE professionals. She helped organize workshops and conducted industry tours, and she served as the club’s president during her senior year.

“I went to a simulation conference in New Orleans with three classmates, which was fun. It was an international competition, and we got third place,” she says.

In her senior year, Dates was inducted into Tau Beta Pi, the engineering honors society. She was also a member of Alpha Pi Mu, the industrial engineering honors society, where she served on the executive board as a graduate student. In addition to her extracurriculars, Dates worked with the Watson Career and Alumni Connections office and served as an undergraduate course assistant for first-year engineering classes.

For her senior capstone project, Dates worked with Locker Room 345, a charity started by Dick’s Sporting Goods to donate clothes to youths in the community. Dates and her team created a consistent ordering and fulfillment system, and they brainstormed ways to get more volunteers and make ordering easier.

“We created a simulation to look at how we could best allocate volunteers to help pick up orders faster, and we also worked with a development team that was making a website for teachers to go in and place orders,” she says. “It was a really good project to work on and use a lot of different things that we learned throughout our time at Watson.”

During the 2023–24 academic year, Dates interned at Tesla in Buffalo, N.Y., where she worked on energy products. She started a job as an automation engineering manager for Walmart last summer.