Amid the difficulty of a turbulent first year of college, David Kwon stumbled upon one piece of good fortune.
He had signed up for ISyE 191: The Practice of Industrial Engineering, purely because it was an introductory course that fit into his schedule. With family health issues in South Korea weighing on him and an impending mandatory military service commitment as a dual citizen hanging over his head (most male citizens of South Korea are required to serve), Kwon had endured a bumpy start to his time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In addition, Kwon had discovered he didn’t enjoy his chemistry lab, which made him question his choice to major in chemical engineering. In ISyE 191, though, he found himself intrigued and excited by the malleability of industrial engineering, the seemingly unending number of business settings in which he could apply skills from the discipline.
There was just one problem: Even in his favorite class, he still floundered.
Five years later, after fulfilling his military duties and rededicating himself as a student, Kwon is excelling and weighing whether to pursue a PhD in operations research or take a job in industry after graduating in May 2024.
“He’s really detail-oriented and puts a lot of effort into really understanding things—beyond just to do well,” says Assistant Teaching Professor Amanda Smith, who’s taught Kwon in four different courses, including ISyE 191. “He really wants to understand why things work the way they do, why we do things the way we do them. He really goes to that deeper level.”
Kwon credits his 20-month stint in the South Korean military, during which he was a signalman squad leader, handling communications for his unit through numerous live mortar ranges, with helping him to mature and to appreciate the opportunity in front of him in college.
“I really came to crave academics,” he says. “I’d been studying my whole life from K-12, but now that I stopped, I kind of felt the importance of it.”
After returning to Madison in 2021, he discovered he had a knack for mathematical optimization. ISyE 323: Operations Research-Deterministic Modeling has a reputation as the most difficult of the required courses for industrial engineering majors, one that students often put off taking until their senior years. But, with the help of Smith and teaching assistant Eric Stratman, a PhD student, Kwon says the complex mathematical modeling clicked for him.
That’s one of the reasons he frequently encourages first- and second-year students to take courses with Smith, whom he calls “the best teacher I’ve had in my life.”
Kwon is spending his spring 2024 semester as an industrial engineering intern at Disneyland, rekindling his childhood love of Cars and Toy Story while working on ways to optimize the park’s operations. He’s applied to graduate schools but is also considering pursuing a career in industrial engineering, operations research, and consulting.
Wherever he winds up, it’s a very different path than the one he was on five years ago.
“I want to become a person who can provide mathematically backed solutions,” he says. “That’s the best part of industrial engineering, being applicable to all sorts of industries and all sorts of roles. Nothing is limited.”