Delivering Solutions: LSU Industrial Engineering Alumna Innovating at USPS
July 9, 2020
BATON ROUGE, LA – As a minority and a female, LSU Industrial Engineering alumna Jayda
Malveaux has worked hard to excel in college and now as an operations industrial engineer
for the U.S. Postal Service in New Orleans.
In her role with the USPS, Malveaux works on different projects to try and improve the mail sorting process, especially in light of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
“With letter volume going down, we can’t continue to have employees manually work that mail, so we brought in robots to sort the letter volume,” she said. “That way, we’re decreasing our cost in letters. Since package volume is increasing, we need to figure out what we need to do to increase efficiency. Pretty much every day, it’s asking what do we need to be doing to make things better while still figuring out where our biggest opportunities are. What do we need to do to get our service scores up and improve customer satisfaction?”
After earning her IE degree in 2017, Malveaux went to work for USPS, even though she had quite a few other jobs to choose from. USPS had a two-year onboarding fast-track training program to learn the complex business and gave her time to work on process improvement. In those two years, she trained in Oklahoma and Washington, D.C., where she met other engineers.
Malveaux credits her many internships, mentors and the College of Engineering Office of Diversity for helping her navigate through college and lead her to where she is today. Born in Lake Charles and raised in Lafayette, La., she attended Acadiana High School and initially wanted to pursue math, until her mother pointed out that she could aim higher.
“One day, she told me I have more potential than that, not that there’s anything wrong with teaching math,” Malveaux said. “That’s when I branched out into the engineering world.”
Malveaux thought she wanted to major in computer science at LSU until she attended the college’s Encounter Engineering Summer Camp, where she discovered she liked industrial engineering.
“I really enjoyed my IE classes,” she said. “They were all tailored to what I wanted to do, from plant layout and supply chain to ergonomics, which all apply to my current job.”
Part of the challenge Malveaux faced as a student was being a female in STEM [science, technology, engineering and math], recalling she was one of only a few females working during her internships. Today, she advises female engineering students to get ahead of the curve by getting to know their IE professors.
“That will take you a long way,” she said. “You can take their class one semester, then the next semester use them as a mentor.”
Malveaux has also spent the last year volunteering with the Junior League of New Orleans, where she helped students prepare for RISE [Resident In-Service Examination] by teaching them math. She is now considered an active member and is going on her second year with JLNO.
Through her hard work and words of encouragement, Malveaux shows female engineering students that anything is possible.
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Contact: Libby Haydel
Communications Specialist