Rosalie Dahlke, Supply Chain Management

Why Porter

“I live on my family's dairy farm outside Millbrook Corners. Living on campus would have cost about $10,400 a year in room and board, and I'm needed for milking on weekends anyway. Porter was the closest four-year school with a real supply chain program, and you can't do supply chain online if you want to stand in a warehouse, which I did.”

Rosalie is a junior in Supply Chain Management in the College of Business. She is one of the many Porter students who commute, and one of a smaller group whose commute includes a county highway that is plowed second.

The hands-on part

Most of her classes are in Commerce Hall, and the one she talks about most is SCM 310, Logistics Management, where student teams model a real distribution network for a regional partner. This fall her team is working with data from Great Lakes Logistics, where she also completed her required internship last summer.

• The internship: ten weeks on the inbound dock and in the planning office, rebuilding the dock appointment schedule so trucks stopped stacking up at 6 a.m.
• The result: average driver wait time fell from 52 minutes to 31. “The drivers brought me donuts. That's the only performance review I need.”
• The class project: a model of where Great Lakes should put a cross-dock if a planned interstate interchange opens in 2029.

She also uses her commute as a case study. “I tracked 140 drives last year: leave time, weather, arrival, whether I found a spot in Lot E. If I leave at 7:10 instead of 7:25, I save eleven minutes and almost never park in the overflow lot. I presented it in SCM 340 and got an A. My dad says I spent a year proving what he told me in August.”

A hard semester

“Last January we had four snow days in two weeks and the county road was closed twice when campus wasn't. I missed a quiz, a group meeting and a lab. I thought I'd just eat the zeros. My Operations professor told me about the winter parking rules and the snow-day policy for commuters, and the Dean of Students office helped me document the closures. I made up everything.

“What I learned is that commuting isn't a personal failing you have to hide. There's a whole system for it if you ask. I now have a winter plan: a friend in Depot Apartments with a couch, a go-bag in the trunk, and the Porter Loop schedule saved on my phone for the days I park downtown and ride in.”

Making a home base

The commuter lounge in Founders Union 130 is, by her own count, where she spends more waking hours than anywhere except the barn. It has lockers, a kitchenette and a shelf of labeled crockpots on Mondays. Rosalie is now treasurer of the Supply Chain Association and runs the lounge's Monday soup swap. “If you commute, you have to build the parts of college that just happen to people who live here. Lunch is one of those parts.”

Her typical Monday, for the record:

• 4:45 a.m.: morning milking with her brother.
• 7:10 a.m.: on the road; 38 minutes in good weather, which she logs.
• 8 a.m.–12:15 p.m.: classes in Commerce Hall, including a supply chain analytics lab in the trading room lab, which borrows its screens for forecasting exercises.
• 12:15 p.m.: soup swap in the lounge. Eleven regulars, three crockpots, one rule: label anything with nuts.
• 1–4 p.m.: group project time at Halvorsen Library, because her teammates live on campus and “the meeting has to happen while I'm here.”
• 4:30 p.m.: home for evening chores.

“People ask if I feel like I'm missing out. Some days. But I also go home to a quiet kitchen and a dog, and I've never once had to share a bathroom with a floor.”

What’s next

She plans a spring co-op in procurement at a regional food processor and wants to work in agricultural supply chains after graduating in 2028. “Milk has a shelf life of about two weeks. Every dairy farmer is already a logistics manager. I'd just like to be paid for it.”