Alumni

Adam Gill

Engineering Program Manager – Apple
MEM ‘14

After growing up in small-town southwest Wisconsin, Adam attended University of Wisconsin-Madison where he received his BSEE and played trombone in the marching band. After college, he began work as a Product Engineer at Plexus, a Wisconsin-based contract engineering and manufacturing firm. After a year, he transferred to Plexus’ Chicagoland facility as a Test Engineer working primarily on test design and implementation for medical electronics programs. After completing his MEM degree in December 2014, Adam decided to pursue his longtime goal of working for Apple, and is currently an Engineering Program Manager (EPM) working on the iPad.

He feels as though the MEM program gave him the tools he needed to transition from an engineer into a leader, and be far more effective with the teams that he works with. Through courses like project management, product development, marketing and organizational leadership, he gained the skills that were necessary to bring value to Apple as an EPM.

It is difficult for Adam to pick a single fondest memory from the MEM program, but in Mike Marasco’s Technical Entrepreneurship course, their trip to 1871 in the Merchandise Mart was especially exciting and was great to hear first-hand from start-up founders in an incubator setting.

Adam's favorite course was Organizational Leadership and Behavior with Gail Berger. It gave him a new perspective on his relationships at work and in everyday life.

His advice for future students would be to read the course packets, even the case studies that aren’t assigned. Keep them and re-read them from time-to-time and keep organized notes from lectures, so you can go back and review them as well. He also feels you should practice speaking and presentation skills as much as possible, and develop your writing skills. By far, the most important thing in being successful is being able to communicate your ideas and listening to the ideas of others.

Outside of work, Adam enjoys playing ultimate frisbee, biking, meeting new friends, eating good food and seeing what’s new on Reddit or HBO. He has relocated from Chicago to San Francisco and loves living in California!