Boundless Energy
Kristin Lancaster is the IT project manager for Industrial Internet programs at GE Hitachi in Castle Hayne. The Industrial Internet is machine data and software that engineers and other people on the service/operational side of the equation use to keep things running smoothly for those of us on the consumer side.
Lancaster discovered a love for learning and teaching technology while receiving her undergraduate degree in psychology from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (her minor was information systems).
“I had a role as a Powerpoint, Access, and Excel instructor on campus and thought it would be a fun career to combine my strengths in understanding human behaviors/motivations and developing systems that make your job and life easier,” she says.
After the dot-com crash, she returned to UNC for a master’s degree in information science on a full tuition scholarship. While there, she worked as the computer lab manager at the helpdesk.
“If you want to learn IT, work at a helpdesk early in your career,” she says. “You get all sorts of questions and have to pretend to be the expert in both software and hardware.”
Then it was on to an MBA at Boston College – “because I was interested in the business side of technology and innovation,” Lancaster says.
The temperature was a bit more than she could bear, though, so when Lancaster was ready for her next step, she turned south.
“After MBA School in Boston, I wanted to try out management consulting and strategic planning in new much warmer city, Washington, D.C. I landed a job through the Boston College career center with Booz Allen Hamilton in McLean, Virginia and knew very little about the military going into that job,” says Lancaster, who adds that her dad, though, was a Navy pilot with twenty-two years of service.
While working at the Pentagon she developed strategic plans for the Air National Guard and the Navy.
“The pinnacle of that experience was probably writing the Secretary of the Navy’s Energy Strategic Plan for 2010, which included developing initiatives for reaching 50 percent of Navy/Marine Corps’ energy to be from alternative energy sources such as biofuels and nuclear energy,” she says.
Lancaster says working at the Pentagon is different from what most people would expect.
“It’s a small city in one building, with 20,000 people working around the clock hours, the building has a Best Buy, Popeyes, a flower shop (for when you know you are going home late), a Starbucks, and you better plan fifteen minutes to walk to/locate your next meeting or you probably will not make it on time,” she says.
Lancaster changed to the position at GE Hitachi a year ago to be closer to her family in Pinehurst after spending a year in Switzerland with Novartis. Due to her experience with the energy industry she says GE Hitachi was a natural fit for her once she decided Wilmington was the place she wanted to live.
“I took some advice from my career coach Jenny Blake that if I just picked the city where I felt the most ‘at home, free of what weighs you down, and supported in your values,’ then the job would eventually materialize,” she says.
To view more of photographer Chris Brehmer's work, go to www.chrisbrehmerphotography.com
