Industrial Engineering Grad's Journey in STEM Takes Her to Facebook
By the end of this month, Rukayat Balogun will be working at Facebook as a site logistics analyst, overseeing staff that maintain the servers and the facility, and ensuring compliance with industry standards. She will be located just outside of Atlanta for this new position, which came her way last fall when a fellow student in NJIT’s Educational Opportunity Program (EOP) introduced Balogun to a visiting Facebook recruiter. The company flew her down south for what turned out to be a series of video interviews, followed by a bit of a wait.
“The interviews went well, but it was nerve-wracking because I didn’t hear from them for about another month,” recalled the December 2019 industrial engineering graduate.
Logistics and leadership have become Balogun’s strong suits. She’ll be leaving her full-time job as a data analyst (that began as a part-time internship) at the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME) to start at Facebook. Balogun has been with NACME, “the largest provider of college scholarships for underrepresented minorities pursuing degrees at schools of engineering,” since this past August, based in its recently opened satellite office at VentureLink, NJIT’s business incubation hub. Her work there has entailed updating and cleaning the data on the organization’s scholarship recipients as well as streamlining the process to access it.
She will also step away shortly from another role: national vice chairperson of the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE). Balogun was active in the organization while an undergrad, as president of the NJIT chapter, Region 1 treasurer and Region 1 chairperson. She campaigned for her current post, which ends in April after a year of service.
It was through NSBE conventions and career fairs that Balogun landed an internship with Otis Elevator Company and co-ops with Johnson & Johnson during her years at NJIT. At Ethicon, a J&J subsidiary in Somerville, N.J., that manufactures medical devices, she was a master data analyst for 10 months tasked with auditing and making sure specs complied with Food and Drug Administration standards.
“My job was really to gather all the data and be able to present it to upper-level management … showing the company how well we were doing, where we needed to improve, [where] we could take advantage of opportunities,” said Balogun, who was a sophomore at the time.
She then spent the summer of 2017, before her junior year, in South Carolina as a manufacturing intern at Otis. There she met with operators of the different lines to hear their grievances and learn what they needed. She also conducted time studies and created a shadow board to help better organize workers’ tools.
Her second co-op with J&J placed her in the company’s Skillman, N.J., project management office for a good portion of 2018. Balogun describes this experience as being the “project manager of project managers,” focused on critical projects such as product formulations and site relocations that involved a lot of money and resources. For the relaunch of J&J’s baby-care line, for example, she had to keep track of 25 products.
Finding Her Passion
Balogun, whose parents emigrated from Nigeria in the 1980s, is the youngest of four children and grew up in East Orange, N.J. Her inclination toward STEM developed early, she said.
“In my household, my mom was really big on education. It was like come home, do homework and then after your homework do more work,” she remembered. “I wasn’t the biggest fan of reading, so I definitely fell in line with the maths and sciences, the sciences being physics and chemistry, the experimental sciences.”
She first considered pursuing engineering when, as a 10th-grader at Science Park High School, she enjoyed building a model home replete with circuitry as part of her AP physics class. But still unsure, she sought the advice of her brother, a mechanical aerospace engineering graduate who suggested she look into industrial engineering. She attended an outreach program at Rutgers through NSBE and talked with IE students about their studies and the field. She was hooked.
“Process, efficiency, quality control, I love all of that,” Balogun said. “That’s when I decided, OK, industrial, that’s what I’m going to do.”
She was accepted by NJIT on an Instant Decision Day at her high school and went on to apply to EOP, a program for which she remains eternally grateful for both its academic and personal support. While at NJIT, she complemented her coursework with a slew of extracurricular activities, including Student Senate freshman class president and treasurer, NSBE chapter program chair, African Student Association social director and Women’s Basketball team manager.
With the beginning of her career at Facebook just weeks away, and with Women’s History Month observed nationwide in March, how does Balogun think her experiences underscore the progress women have made in STEM? She chalks it up a lot in her case to exposure.
“Being exposed to STEM and engineering gave me the idea that I could do it. Being exposed [to] leadership let me know that I could go very far in this leadership position [at NSBE]. Being exposed to corporate America and exposed to the duties of what an actual practicing engineer can do let me know that, OK, well you’re in the right major (laughs) and you’re capable of doing anything.”
Women’s History Month is a commemoration that encourages “the study, observance and celebration of the vital role of women in American history.” It is a joint initiative of the Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, National Endowment for the Humanities, National Gallery of Art, National Park Service, Smithsonian Institution and United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
