Mechanical Engineering alumnus finds new opportunity in the Twin Cities

In February of 2017, Sanvisna Kogelen attended a seminar on the Iowa State University campus. He was a year away from earning his Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering, and he had been searching for a job in the industry.

One of the speakers at the seminar was Karin Lawton-Dunn, the Career Services Coordinator in the Graduate College, who had helped Kogelen in his job hunt. The two caught up after her presentation, and Lawton-Dunn asked Kogelen if he would be attending a career fair later that day. When he said no, she insisted that he attend and network.

“She asks me why I’m slacking and I have all these excuses, and she tells me to go home, put on my snow boots, and get to the fair. And that’s exactly what I did,” Kogelen said. And that fair was where he met a recruiter from HDR, the company he now works for.

HDR is a global company that specializes in engineering, architecture, construction, and environmental services. Kogelen recently joined their acoustics team in Minneapolis.

Sanvisna Kogelen

“I’ll be studying architectural acoustics, which is pretty much how sound reverberates in a room, and environmental acoustics, which is traditional stuff like highway noise, or noise from airplanes and how that affects human beings and other living creatures,” he said. The new position will allow him to build on his experiences at Iowa State.

Kogelen began his undergraduate studies in his native Malaysia before making the decision to pursue a degree in the United States. The renowned faculty and hands-on opportunities at Iowa State stood out to him, and he transferred to the university in the fall of 2015.

“I wanted the American experience,” he said. “I got out of my comfort zone a lot, and that’s helped me build relationships with people from another culture and understand the culture better in terms of schoolwork. I’m more American now in that I’m ready to give you good work, but when I need to rest, I’m going to value my rest as well.”

Soon after arriving in Ames, Kogelen also began working as a research assistant alongside a professor he had in his first semester.

“I was just the kind of kid who’s very curious about stuff, so I couldn’t shut up,” Kogelen joked. “I’d keep talking to [my professor] after class, but he liked that, so he gave me a research assistantship.”

His assistantship taught him all about doing research, writing literature reviews, and working in state-of-the-art laboratories. He was able to leverage that experience into a graduate school offer, and he began working on his master’s degree in 2016.

As an Iowa State graduate student, Kogelen focused his research on sound transmission through double-paneled partitions. Double-paneled partitions, he said, are “just two walls connected by an air gap. It seems simple in theory, but it’s very complicated. It’s a very niche field.”

He credits Assistant Professor Shan Hu, who served as his mechanical engineering major professor, with helping him gain the qualities that employers wanted. Hu’s professional experience taught her which skills were most sought after in the engineering world, and she shared that knowledge with Kogelen.

“Sanvisna was a self-motivated and independent graduate student. He is excellent in gathering the information needed to come up with solutions for a research problem,” Hu said. “I believe with those qualities, Sanvisna will have a successful career as a research and development engineer.”

Toward the end of his master’s program, Kogelen began looking for jobs by doing what a lot of applicants do: sending his résumé to countless companies and keeping his fingers crossed.

“I looked up résumé workshops, and Karin was giving one,” Kogelen said. “She blew my expectation out of the water completely in the first five minutes. She started speaking about computer algorithms and why sometimes really good candidates are passed over, without even getting human eyes on your résumé.”

He kept in touch with Lawton-Dunn after that workshop, and they worked on improving his résumé, LinkedIn profile, and networking skills.

“A résumé needs to be organized to go through the applicant tracking system that industries have, which is a computer screening program for their keywords that match the job description,” Lawton-Dunn explained. “So we worked on not just talking about what his research was, but what his skills are. And he worked a lot on getting his LinkedIn profile to match his résumé.”

They also worked together on building Kogelen’s networking skills. Lawton-Dunn believes that graduate students need to spend more time networking, especially since that’s how most workers find jobs.

“Sanvisna was doing a lot more networking behind the scenes than I even knew about, until he came in and said that he had been on 25 informational interviews,” Lawton-Dunn said. “He went out and found people that were in jobs he was interested in doing, and made phone calls and met with them one on one.”

It was this networking experience that ultimately helped Kogelen land a job with HDR. After meeting a recruiter at the career fair, he found the acoustics program manager, Tim Casey, on LinkedIn and introduced himself. Soon after, they had an informal conversation about Kogelen's professional background.

“It wasn’t even over the phone, he just wanted to go over my experiences,” Kogelen said. “But then he decided that I did not have enough experience in vibrations. And acoustics and vibrations go hand in hand.”

With that feedback in mind, Kogelen spent the last year of his program studying theories in traditional vibration. After he completed his master’s thesis, he sent Casey an updated résumé. A month later, a position at HDR opened up, and Casey asked him if he was still looking for a job. Kogelen traveled to Minneapolis for an on-site interview, which quickly led to a job offer.

He credits Iowa State with not only developing his industry skills, but also helping him build relationships with professionals. And he believes that everyone, especially international students, can find the right job if they make connections.

“I’ve found success just in speaking with professionals, and Karin taught me to build relationships with professionals in the industry. You can contact alumni or contact people on LinkedIn who have jobs like the one you’re looking for,” he said. “Now you have a relationship with someone who would have been a stranger otherwise, and someone who knows you’re proactive. And being international might be seen as a disadvantage, but there are ways to circumvent that. When you realize that you know the right people, good things happen.”

As Kogelen transitions into his new job, he is excited to be in Minneapolis and to bring his experience to HDR. But he’s also sad to leave Ames, the first place in the U.S. that he called home.

“The Twin Cities were one of the places I really wanted to move to,” he said. “But moving feels weird because a place that was home for five years, isn’t home anymore. Ames is so dynamic, with the amount of people who come in and come out. It’s time to end my journey with Ames and start in the Twin Cities.”