Free Nonsense
inesc pORTO AND CONSULTING
by Kristen Schell*
Coming from the United States, with a background in Chemical and Environmental Engineering, and Engineering and Public Policy, the supply chain and business focus of the UESP department at INESC Porto is a little bit of a change for me. I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2007 and went to work in the energy and climate change field. Working at a government consulting firm, I modeled greenhouse gas emissions inventories for oil and natural gas companies, and for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Being located in Washington, DC, I had the opportunity to take a new position in energy policy evaluation and design, for the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House. However, I quickly became discouraged with how little quantitative analysis goes into federal policy making, and I went to study public decision making from a mathematical programming/optimization point of view, in the Environmental Engineering department at Johns Hopkins University. I am now working in the UESP unit of INESC Porto, developing a model to help policy makers in the Azores better understand the societal, environmental and investment tradeoffs in power generation alternatives for the islands.
I began work at INESC Porto three months ago and the advantages to working in a collaborative research environment are clear. My previous work experience has been in government consulting, where the timelines and demands for deliverables often meant compromising on the quality of the analysis. Timesheet records were kept in 15 minute intervals, because your individual billable time and punch rate data were used to determine your effectiveness as an employee. The emphasis was always on delivering exactly what was agreed upon in the contract and nothing more. If you finished the work early, then you were rewarded for coming in under budget, rather than encouraged to review the product for possible improvements.
The style of work and the corporate culture at INESC Porto are much different. Here, the focus is on the quality of the analysis, rather than on the institute’s bottom line. Success is measured by the effectiveness of the solution, rather than the time it took to solve the problem. And the collegiate atmosphere makes is easy to collaborate with researchers in both your field and others. I am excited to be part of such an institution, where good work, problem solving, research and innovation are highly valued.
*Collaborator at the Manufacturing Systems Engineering Unit (UESP)
