Shooting for Excellence

Allison Hileman, a senior Commonwealth University-Bloomsburg supply chain management and economics student, feels most at home when playing sports. A guard for the Huskies women’s basketball team, she has channeled the discipline needed to athletics to achieve academic success.

Most recently, she became an ASQ Certified Six Sigma Yellow Belt. Six Sigma certification is a program that designates a person’s knowledge of supply chain management.

“Sigma Six gives the ability to gain more job opportunities,” Hileman says. “It gives me a competitive edge. I would test for a higher rank in the future if the job required it.”

She prepared for the rigorous test by attending Zoom classrooms and going over the coursework that could be on sections of the exam. Time management, a skill learned as a student-athlete, was the key to Hileman’s success.

“It was important for me to get in the gym to work with the team and practice every day,” she says. “Structuring my day around this forced me to make time for my homework. I started to find time anywhere, like doing on the bus to and from away games.”

Not one to shy away from opportunities, Hileman also obtained an internship with PNC Bank, where she learned about project innovation. At the internship, she did a presentation of new business ideas.

“One of the things that surprised me about the industry is how everyone needs supply chain management,” she says. “There is a lot that goes into it behind the scenes — how many people work together to make one thing run”

Hileman is excited to see where her certification takes her and hopes to work in a team environment in the future. She envisions working in the sports industry.

“It would be nice to take what I’ve learned from basketball into a team environment and work my way up the chain of management,” she says. “Anything sports-related would be cool as well.”