When 2024 graduate Lauren Coffey Tufto received an email about the Rose Squared (R2) program during her first quarter at Rose-Hulman, she couldn't help but think that it was meant to be.

The chemical engineering major from Plainfield, Indiana, had graduated high school with several hours of college credit and knew that she both wanted to maximize her time in college and pursue a master's degree at some point in her career. The email about Rose Squared led to Tufto joining the first cohort of students to graduate from Rose-Hulman with simultaneous bachelor's and master's degrees at no additional cost.

"I really started thinking this would be a perfect opportunity because I would get to learn that management style approach while I'm still in college without having to worry about coming back to college later in life," Tufto said. "The fact that it's specific to engineering management was something that really appealed to me."

Besides knowing she wanted to earn a master's degree, Tufto had entered Rose-Hulman with a singular career goal – to work at Eli Lilly and Company to develop life-saving pharmaceuticals – and, with the help of Rose Squared, landed first an internship, then a full-time position at Lilly.

"[Having a master's degree] definitely helped me a lot. It was something that stood out to recruiters that I was asked about right when I walked up to them," Tufto said. "It helped me attain the job that I wanted."

Tufto, a senior process control engineer, currently provides automation support to a manufacturing operation producing the active pharmaceutical ingredient in Lilly's insulin.

"I think it helped me with…being able to communicate better with my managers as I was coming in," she said. "Coming in with that perspective sets me up to have more options of potential roles I could go into in the future."

The Rose Squared coursework also helped her discover Six Sigma courses on eliminating errors in production, which Tufto loved so much that she added a minor in the topic. As a project in one of the Six Sigma courses, Tufto and her classmates visited Happiness Bag, a Terre Haute nonprofit providing services to adults with disabilities, and utilized their Six Sigma knowledge to develop more efficient and more accessible storage solutions. Tufto and Professor of Engineering Management Diane Evans, PhD, later presented on the project at the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE) Annual Conference in Montreal, Canada.

"Six Sigma allows you to broaden your perspective a little bit," said Tufto, who also implements a Six Sigma mindset in her career. "[Six Sigma] helps me take a little bit of a step back from the deep weeds of automation…and evaluate my project and how this is benefitting Lilly as a whole. It helps me prioritize between projects."

Juggling priorities and commitments is familiar to Tufto. While at Rose-Hulman, she was captain of the cheer team, president of Omega Chi Epsilon chemical engineering honor society, and an active member in Chi Omega sorority. She also conducted several undergraduate research projects, including one that directly relates to her role at Lilly and one that contributed to a promising breakthrough in the prevention of shingles.

"I wanted the ability to still do things that I enjoy, like cheer, but not have to dedicate hours every single day to be on the collegiate team," Tufto said. "I thought Rose-Hulman offered the perfect balance of allowing me to pursue a degree in STEM as well as be involved in other extracurricular activities."

Rose-Hulman also offered Tufto the opportunity to study abroad at the end of her final winter quarter through a two-week faculty-led intensive course at Technische Universität Darmstadt in Germany. Tufto and five other Rose-Hulman students joined a team including students from German and American colleges to design a polymer production process for a client company. Unlike many of her teammates, Tufto did not speak German, leading to communication challenges and the chance to grow beyond her comfort zone.

"There are going to be hard problems that you go through, especially in the engineering world, when you're communicating with people from different backgrounds and different places," Tufto said. "I really learned how to work with a group and navigate obstacles."

In addition to the vibrant experiences on campus, around the world, and at her dream job that Tufto had desired, college also provided her the unique opportunity to serve the state of Indiana as one of 33 women selected as 2023 Indianapolis 500 Festival Princesses. 500 Festival Princesses serve as ambassadors for the 500 Festival, Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the city of Indianapolis, and the state of Indiana throughout the spring and are each paired with a corporate mentor. Tufto was paired with Rose-Hulman Trustee, Jeffrey Harrison, a 1989 electrical engineering graduate and current CEO of Citizens Energy Group.

"I think, because of the management program, I was more confident to be able to form a connection with him and stay connected," said Tufto. She and Harrison still stay in touch.

The 500 Festival Princesses are also responsible for planning programming to engage their communities in outreach. Tufto focused her royal efforts on STEM education, planning several events for local children, including a day for nearly 100 fourth grade students to learn about physics through building their own bottle racecar at Plainfield's Imagination Lab. It was an experience that took her back to her roots, as she had first become interested in STEM through similar events as a young Girl Scout.

Interestingly, her master's level coursework helped her connect to the elementary school students.

"I had to…try to step into the shoes of different audiences, like kids or parents, and try to think, what would they want to see through a STEM event? What would matter to them?" Tufto said. "That had been a mindset I learned in the master's of engineering management program – stepping into the shoes of a different perspective and thinking, 'Why does this project matter?'"

The princess also found her Prince Charming thanks to the magic of Rose. Lauren met Andrew Tufto in a first-year chemistry lab, and they married in Rose-Hulman's White Chapel in May. Andrew, the former president of both Alpha Tau Omega fraternity and the Interfraternity Council, also graduated in 2024 with a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering, a minor in Six Sigma, and a master's in engineering management from the Rose Squared program. Andrew now also works at Lilly as a senior process engineer, in the same building as his wife.

"He had a lot of leadership experience at Rose, leading eight different fraternities," Lauren said. "I think he was able to gain that management mindset through the R-Squared program."

The R-Squared program, though she couldn't have known from that first fateful email, proved to be something of a magic wand for both Lauren and her husband, leading them to each other and to their dream careers and allowing the chemical engineering princess-turned engineering management master to find her happily ever after.