Sheri Bodkin: Back To Engineering
Sheri Bodkin always assumed she'd be an engineer like her father, uncle and brother - who are actually
all Whiting graduates. But volleyball diverted her from that path.
She went to Rutgers to play volleyball and major in engineering, but when the time came to declare, there was a problem. Her coach said that engineering students went on field trips every weekend, so she'd have to choose between volleyball and engineering. Bodkin chose volleyball and majored in mathematics instead. She was the setter - like the quarterback in football - for the Rutgers team, which played well enough to reach the Big East Conference tournament. And she did well in math, too.
Armed with her B.A., she concentrated on career for several years: first as a statistician for the Census Bureau during the 2000 census; then as a database quality assurance specialist with Costar, the leading provider of commercial real estate information in the U.S. and the U.K.; next as a retail database person with The Rouse Company; and now as a resource management consultant with Fentress Incorporated.
Bodkin's Fentress assignment is with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and involves their customs and border protection operations. She uses math modeling to help them predict needs, set priorities and plan the allocation of resources - budget, personnel, facilities -- among more than 160 "ports of entry" along U.S. borders. Currently, she is working on resource management for the world's busiest port of entry, at San Ysidro in Southern California adjacent to Tijuana.
Since studying it at Rutgers, Bodkin has had an interest in astronomy, so she slips off to the mountains for stargazing when she gets a chance. But another long-standing passion has demanded much more of her time. "I wanted to get back to engineering in some form," she says about her decision to study at EP for an M.S. in Applied and Computational Mathematics, which she expects to receive in 2007. As a veteran of the working world, she appreciates the way real applications are brought right into the classroom by teachers and students employed in the field, which she characterizes as "more dynamic, less textbook." She has especially enjoyed the highly-interactive teaching style of department chair Jim Spall. "Taking his course is an adventure," she says.