Dickson named industrial engineering student marshal
4/9/2017
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Senior Wes Dickson has been selected as the student marshal for the industrial engineering baccalaureate degree program at the College of Engineering spring commencement ceremony on May 6. Dickson will receive a bachelor of science degree in industrial engineering and a certificate in Six Sigma.
He has selected Guodong “Gordon” Pang, associate professor within the Harold and Inge Marcus of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering (IME), to be his faculty escort at the ceremony.
College of Engineering student marshals are selected for their outstanding academic achievement and contributions to engineering student life.
“I am extremely honored and humbled to have been selected as student marshal for the IME department,” Dickson said. “The support I have received from my professors and the faculty advisors has been incredible. I am excited to be able to apply the knowledge I have learned in the classroom and the labs to the workforce.”
A native of Wayne, Pennsylvania, Dickson is the president of the Penn State chapter of Alpha Pi Mu, the industrial engineering honor society, and the co-corporate chair of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) student chapter. He is also a member of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity.
Dickson has been the recipient of multiple scholarships during his time at Penn State including: the Alpha Pi Mu S. Balachandran Service Scholarship (2017); IISE Dwight D. Gardner Scholarship (2016); Harold and Inge Marcus Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering Scholarship (2015 and 2016); Nicholas Kay Scholarship (2016); John B. and Catherine B. Nelson/McGraw Foundation Endowed Scholarship (2016); and the Harold A. Johnson Scholarship (2015).
An active member of both the industrial engineering community and the larger University community, he was presented with the Marcus department’s Jackie Livella/IISE Award for Service in 2016.
“The IISE/IME Award Banquets are great because they bring industrial engineering students, families, faculty, staff and alumni all together under one roof. It was a wonderful experience to celebrate the outstanding people in our department during both banquets I attended,” Dickson said.
Dickson was research associate this semester, assisting Pang’s research in improving health care efficiencies. He also previously worked as a teaching assistant for EDSGN 100: Introduction to Engineering Design.
He completed an internship during the summer of 2016 with Siemens’ Operations Leadership Development Program in Greenville, South Carolina, where he led kaizen events, automated outdated processes and executed improvement projects for the company. He also completed co-ops with Ingersoll-Rand in Tyler, Texas, during the spring and summer of 2015. In his role there, he worked with an operations engineering team to facilitate the plant's continuous improvement process.
Following graduation, Dickson will begin his career as a management engineer with Duke University Health System in Durham, North Carolina. He will be working with a team of roughly 50 industrial engineers that is working to improve the patient experience and design better health systems for the future.
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