News & Announcements
From SDM to Adobe: Tanvi’s path, portfolio strategy, and job search playbook
Tanvi returned to share what her job in experience research looks like, how she structured a portfolio that got attention, and the habits that kept her job search moving. It was honest, specific, and very usable for anyone aiming at product teams. Five takeaways to act on this week Apply fast on the company website. Use LinkedIn to find roles, not to hit Easy Apply. Treat your portfolio like a set of short books. Make each project easy to pick up and hard to put down. Prepare real stories for behavioral interviews. Memorize points, not scripts. Curate 4 to 6…
More...

Insights from Soumil Panwar: Navigating UX, Strategy, and Career Growth
We recently hosted Soumil Panwar, Senior UX Designer at Optum in Dallas, for an engaging alumni talk. Soumil, a Parsons SDM graduate (Class of 2023), shared his career journey, portfolio strategies, and reflections on navigating the UX and product design industry. Below are the key highlights and insights. Career Journey into UX Soumil’s design path began in India, where he ran his own design agency before moving into UX through client projects in software. At Optum, he started with execution-focused UX tasks but gradually expanded into leading UX research, managing teams, and bridging product strategy with technical feasibility. His journey…
More...

MS SDM Panel Discussion
Be comfortable being uncomfortable: Reflections from the MS SDM Peer-to-Peer Panel Starting a new academic year invites fresh questions about what strategic design looks like in practice. We opened the semester with a Peer-to-Peer Panel designed to meet those questions head on, pairing an opening conversation with Professor Edward Cardimona with a student panel that traced real paths through the first year of MS Strategic Design and Management. The brief for the session was simple, be specific, be honest, and share what actually helped. What emerged was a clear through line, growth follows discomfort, and strategic design is a practice…
More...

About
The MS in Strategic Design & Management challenges students to understand business as an inherently creative human undertaking uniquely suited to confront the massive societal and economic shifts of the 21st century. The MS SDM program is situated at the cutting edge of historic changes in how value is understood and created at large through business management, and aims to continue to set the pace in an uncertain world.
Students learn to utilize Design Thinking (DT) methods within applied and contextual ethnographic/design research projects to develop strategies which can be articulated through business models, organizational innovations, and the redesign of both collective and individual cultures and mindsets.