Melanie Rudloff ’24

With a bachelor’s in business informatics from the Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University in Germany, Melanie Rudloff had hit the ground running. She was working at a German telecommunications company, building the back end of a commission-payment system, but she wanted to go further.

“I had a highly technical and statistical background,” she says, and while that gave her a good start, she needed to round out her portfolio of skills in order to take on more senior roles. “I tried to find a job right away without any experience, but in Germany, companies want to see that you have a theoretical background, so getting a master’s degree just made sense.”

After receiving a Fulbright scholarship, Rudloff had a range of schools to choose from, but the breadth of the LeBow program proved especially attractive. “I wanted to broaden my horizon, focusing on one specific niche but without restricting myself to just a major and a minor,” she says.

“The marketing degree at Drexel offered different specializations, which I didn’t see in other universities. It gives you the opportunity to look into so many different topics at once.”

With the master’s in hand, she returned to her former employer as an AI project manager and data analyst, putting her newfound breadth of knowledge to work.

“I’m doing a lot of project management right now, which is at the intersection of multiple fields,” Rudloff says. “Marketing is one component — particularly digital marketing, which I did at Drexel — as well as projects focused on applying AI to physical marketing,”

For example, she’s helping to create an AI-driven bot to support the sales function, and an AI routine to consolidate and analyze online customer feedback from across nearly 250 stores across Germany.

“I’m responsible for setting up projects, and that comes with budgeting and resource allocation, as well as stakeholder onboarding, recruiting and change management,” she says.

Her LeBow training primed her for success here, along with a communications course she took as a graduate elective. “Theories of Communication and Persuasion helped me to understand how people think, what their expectations are and how you need to communicate on different levels — both with customers and inside of the company.”

In her native German, Rudloff notes, the phrase “wrapping paper” refers to how you dress up your words so that people can understand what your intended meaning. Her graduate communications class taught the practical application of that practice, and now those skills support her everyday work.

“It’s really important for me as a project manager to navigate the different areas of communication and to address each target audience accordingly, whether it’s management, other stakeholders or external people,” she says.

Beyond the coursework, Rudloff said, the diversity of the Drexel student population helped her to expand her professional understanding.

“There are so many different people at Drexel from so many different backgrounds,” she says. “Working in project management, you never know who’s going to be on your project — what people or skill sets you need on a project. Drexel gave me a smooth introduction to that world, so that I can put together effective projects and teams.”