My ISyE Story: Felipe Simon
I don’t think there is a straight path to a Ph.D. In my case, it probably started during my last year of undergraduate program at Universidad Católica de Chile when I read the book Who Gets What and Why by Al Roth. As an Industrial Engineering major, I was taught about how to optimize processes. For example, I learned how to manage inventories, analyze queues, route vehicles and every other classic example from an Industrial Engineering curriculum. It hadn't occurred to me that markets could be seen as a different form of these problems until I read Roth's book.
Roth's work illustrates how various everyday items and services are allocated without the use of money, emphasizing how small rules shape behaviors and outcomes. For example, when assigning students to schools, parents are asked to list their preference. From a purely Industrial Engineering perspective, if we wanted to maximize the number of students that get their first choice, we could easily write an optimization for this task and call it a day. People, being the clever creatures that we are, might realize that if their most preferred school is also highly demanded they might be better off not reporting it in their preference and put a safer choice as their first option. By being too optimization-focused we gave parents an incentive to cheat the system. (For anyone curious on how people came up with a way to incentivize parents to report their preferences truthfully, I highly recommend exploring Professor Nick Arnosti’s class IE 5285).
Once I realized how these seemingly simple and well-intentioned rules made a substantial impact on how things are allocated, I started noticing them everywhere. I wanted to study more of these systems and decided to go to graduate school. I applied to the University of Minnesota (UMN) because the Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE) department has people that work on the type of problems I am interested in.The program seemed very flexible, this would allow me to explore topics that are not often studied in a typical Industrial Engineering program.
This convinced me that UMN would be a nice fit for me.
Soon after my arrival in Minnesota I started working with Professor Nick Arnosti. After a period of exploration we decided to study how resources are allocated to households experiencing homelessness. In particular, we wanted to know how different prioritization rules lead to different levels of unhoused populations. We found simple prioritizations that were quite effective. I have presented these findings at a couple of conferences, which has allowed great opportunities to meet people with similar interests and to travel around the country.
Post-graduation I want to go back home to Chile and find a position in a university so I can continue exploring these problems. I am sure that I will find new systems to analyze back home with what I learned at ISyE. One problem that has already caught my attention is how cities allocate seats for their free or inexpensive community education classes among neighbors. These classes are always in high demand so having a fair allocation should be a priority. I am excited about teaching these allocation mechanisms because they affect our everyday life, whether we notice them or not.