From Blueprints To Brand Strategy — Julie Roehm
How a Purdue engineering education built a career that defies the org chart
This spring, Purdue University’s Lyles School of Civil Engineering honored me with the 2026 Alumni Achievement Award. It is a recognition I am deeply grateful for, and one that sparked a reflection I have been meaning to put into words for a long time.
The skills that make a great engineer are the same skills that make a great leader, strategist, or marketer. Full stop.
Engineering trains you to think in systems. You learn to isolate variables, follow the load path, and never accept “it seems fine” as a structural argument. That discipline, rigorous, evidence-driven, and relentlessly focused on outcomes, does not stay neatly inside the boundaries of a technical role. It follows you everywhere. Into the boardroom. Into the brief. Into every decision where the stakes are real and the margin for error is not.
The term STEM has become a rallying cry for educators and policymakers, but its value is still too often framed narrowly: study science and technology, become a scientist or technologist. That framing undersells the education by an enormous margin.
My own career is a case in point. A civil engineering degree at Purdue gave me something no marketing textbook ever could, a trained instinct for solving the right problem. In engineering, a brilliant solution to the wrong problem is still a catastrophic failure. That principle travels. It shapes how I listen to a client, how I define a target audience, how I test a hypothesis and read results without fooling myself.
STEM is not a pipeline to a laboratory. It is a lens that makes every profession sharper.
Purdue recognizing achievement that grows from an engineering foundation, all the way into marketing and communications, sends a signal worth amplifying. It tells the next generation of civil engineers that their degree is not a ceiling defining where they must end up. It is a foundation determining how high they can build, in whatever direction they choose.
The morning forum with CE 498 Senior Design students this year reinforced this for me. These soon-to-graduate engineers are already the problem-solvers, the data-readers, the deadline-keepers that every industry is urgently trying to hire. The question worth putting to them, and to every STEM student, is not only “What kind of engineer will you be?” but “What kind of professional will your engineering mindset make you?”
The answer, I would argue, is: a better one. In whatever field you choose.
Congratulations to my fellow 2026 CEAAA honorees. And thank you, Purdue, for reminding us all that the true value of a great education is not measured by the job title it produces, but by the quality of thinking it instills, for life.
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