Blog Post #1: Introduction

Bridging the two worlds:
Business Management and Computer Science

Background

Hello! My name is GinWook Lee and I was born and raised in South Korea. Before getting into computer science, I worked as a management consultant in New York for about six years focusing on enterprise operating model design and digital transformation for Fortune 500 companies across multiple industries.

My first bachelor’s degree was in business administration concentrating on finance and international business at Emory University Goizueta Business School. I also served in the Republic of Korea Army for about two years in between my college years and was honorobly discharged as a sergeant.

Why did you choose to go into Computer Science?

As a management consultant, I worked with many different firms solving their utmost business management problems, each of which was unique to their business environment and circumstances. Yet, solutions to those problems shared some aspects of new technologies that were up-and-coming at the time of each project. One of the biggest challenges to enable such technologies was the fact that the management leaderships don’t speak the same language as the developers, and vice versa, causing unncessary internal conflicts.

Once I complete my second bachelor’s degree in computer science and gain relevant engineering experiences, I hope to position myself as an effective mediator between the business management and software engineers to help solve new challenges in business.

Why did you choose the projects you did on the survey? What makes them interesting to you?

I chose the AI Coder project as my top choice.

The new AI tools like Copilot and ChatGPT have great potentials to help non-coders to quickly build prototypes of what they have in mind. Although these tools are not “Ginie in a Bottle”, these tools can certainly lower the barriers to entry for those non-coders. The usage of these tools are still in their early phase, but the breadth of applicability seems endless.

Depending on how users customize, such AI tools can change the way people work in various functions of business operations like finance, human resources, IT, supply chain, marketing, and sales.

It would be a great opportunity to have first-hand experience in testing potentials and limitations of the most advanced AI tools publicly available and think through applicable use cases in the industry.

What type of person are you, in terms of a group dynamic?

I am an all-rounder when it comes to a team-play.

I usually gather each team member’s strength (and interest) and try to complement the team by filling in the holes, whether that is to lead, support, analyze, or mediate.

I developed such quality through many different experiences in various types of team environments both personally and professionally: I played soccer competitively in a high school varsity team, performed as a guitarist and a leader in an amateur rock band during college, followed chain of command and led a squad in Republic of Korea Army, and consulted clients from Fortune 500 companies switching to different roles depending on the assigned project teams.