Sometimes you don’t know what you really want until you don’t have it anymore. 

When Jennifer Rumsey (ME’96), a native of Columbus, Indiana, graduated from Purdue, she was pretty sure she was done with Midwestern life. Rumsey went to Boston, where she earned a master’s degree at MIT and then went to work for Nuvera Fuel Cells, a local startup company.

By 2000, Jennifer and her husband, James (ECE’96), both life members, were ready for a change. “I thought I wanted to live outside the Midwest,” says Rumsey, “and after I lived outside the Midwest for four and a half years, I realized I actually really liked the Midwest, and I liked Columbus.”

It wasn’t just hometown nostalgia that lured Rumsey back, though. Columbus is home to Cummins, a Fortune 500 company and easily the city’s largest employer. 

“The biggest driver for coming back to Columbus was Cummins,” Rumsey says. “At that point, the work that Cummins was doing on technologies that made diesel engines better for the environment was really attractive to me, and the fact that there were many different opportunities for somebody with an engineering degree at Cummins was really attractive to me as well, and so that really was what drove the decision to move back to Indiana.”

Rumsey has worked her way up through the ranks at Cummins, and in 2015 she succeeded John Wall as the company’s chief technical officer, becoming the first female to hold that position.

Although engineering is often thought of as a male-dominated field, Rumsey downplays her role as a trailblazer. “I don’t feel like I am necessarily on a totally new road that’s never been traveled by women,” she says, “but I do recognize that I have an opportunity to be a role model and to help encourage more women to pursue technical careers and move up in technical leadership roles.

“If I can break that more stereotypical image and help other women be successful, I would certainly like to do that.” Growing up in Columbus helped plant the seeds that grew into a successful career — but even surrounded by engineers throughout her childhood, it took a little while for Rumsey to warm up to the idea.

“I guess it was probably not until high school that I thought about pursuing engineering, so I didn’t grow up thinking, ‘I want to work for Cummins; I want to be an engineer,’” says Rumsey. “But I’m sure that having Cummins and lots of engineers … there definitely was that influence on me in choosing a career in engineering.”

For the next generation, it might be Rumsey who serves as the influence.