‘Guru’ is a word adopted from Sanskrit, which has come to mean “expert” in English (e.g. “Operations Guru”), but originally meant something closer to “prophet” or “mentor”. In South Asian cultures, educational attainment is one of the highest values one can aspire to, and as such Gurus are regarded with God-like status. There is a famous story from the Hindu epic Mahabharat, where an aspiring archery student voluntarily chops off one of his thumbs and offers it as a tribute to his Guru as a symbol of his commitment to his teacher. While admissions requirements have (thankfully) evolved from chopping off one’s appendages to submitting essays and test scores, the reverence for experts that chose to impart their knowledge to starry eyed pupils remains.
Dr. Goentzel is my capstone advisor. In the fall, he is often seen holding his Supply Chain Finance class outdoors, standing with his notes, surrounded by students sitting on lawn chairs, or cross-legged on the grass, in a scene reminiscent of the old school Gurus in South Asia. Dr. Goentzel leads the Center’s Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab, which gets activated by FEMA whenever a natural disaster strikes to assess infrastructure damage, forecast relief supply needs, and coordinate logistics between responders (all in real-time). While I have never seen what the activation process looks like, I like to think it is something like a bat signal pointing into Dr. Goenzel’s office calling for his help.
Over the course of a single semester, Dr. Acocella, via her Logistics Systems class, has equipped us with enough knowledge to confidently call ourselves Supply Chain experts for a lifetime. She has demystified forecasting methods, Sales & Operations planning, inventory policies and freight procurement among others. She has armed us with an arsenal of equations, grounded with numerous real-world applications from her practice, to tackle demand planning and inventory management woes for organizations at all levels of supply chain planning maturity.
While Dr. Janjevic gives her Advanced Network Design lectures in English, I am convinced Math notation is her first language. She has the superpower of being able to translate any supply chain network problem into nodes, arcs, constraints, decisions and objectives almost instantaneously, generating maps that depict optimal scenarios for entire value-chains as the class looks in awe. Dr. Janjevic leads the Center’s Supply Chain Design Lab, and has taught us the value of good network design in moving supply chain management from a cost control engine in an organization to a more strategic role that can maximize revenue, lower carbon footprints, and improve service.
In the traditional South Asian education system, students lived with their Guru in a setup called a “Gurukul”. Apart from our living quarters being separate, building E40 comes close to this setup. Our instructors, advisors and TAs have offices on the 2nd floor, and on the 3rd floor we have the SCM lab – the spiritual home of the SCM student. Coming into the program, I didn’t fully appreciate the value of this space, but now I see it as one of the biggest reasons our cohort is so tightly knit. This is the space where we spend countless hours working on PSets (MIT way of saying Homework), developing our capstones, listening to guest speakers, or just drinking coffee and chatting about life.
The diversity (and yet interconnectedness) of our professional and cultural backgrounds, and the sheer amount of time we have gotten to spend with each other, has made the SCM cohort itself my Guru—both in the English sense of expertise and the Sanskrit sense of a selfless guide. Name any sort of expertise and someone in this class will have it: we have Python gurus, procurement gurus, case prep gurus, endurance racing gurus, and musical gurus to name a few. But what has left the deepest impression on me is how this class embodies the Sanskrit notion of a guru. My classmates’ willingness to share their time and insights enthusiastically, never treating their knowledge as proprietary, but rather as something to be shared to move us all forward together, has been inspiring. While I don’t see myself chopping off my thumb in tribute to them anytime soon, my gratitude for my classmates and professors is immense.
