To infinity and beyond: Online MS in Organizational Leadership and Supervision grad helps companies reach the stars

Sara Van Sickle is a case study in contradictions. She was a finance major who once hated math. A storyteller who hated writing. A presenter who mastered a speech impediment. And while she doesn’t know what she wants to do when she grows up, she knows how to get people to the stars.

So, when she decided to alter her trajectory yet again, Van Sickle searched for a master’s program customizable enough to complement her life experiences and goals.

Thanks to her mom, Purdue University alumnus Marlene Van Sickle, she found Purdue’s fully online Master of Science in Organizational Leadership & Supervision (MSOLS).

It was the missing piece of her puzzle.

“What I’m working on now, I would attribute to what I’ve learned,” Van Sickle said. “I mean everything that I have remembered for the last two and a half years has made a great difference on the last three months.”

Van Sickle joined Ursa Major Technologies as a proposal and program transition manager weeks after graduating from the MSOLS program in December 2025. The aerospace company designs and manufactures rocket engines, missiles and satellite propulsion systems.

As the proposal and program transition manager, she works with the new product development team. When her company gets a project request, Van Sickle collaborates with engineers and finance team members to draft a proposal that captures the client’s vision and needs.

“Bridging that gap is my job now,” Van Sickle said.

The new career opportunity and the smooth transition were made easy, thanks to the degree.

“They were looking for someone with my experiences; I was looking to try something new,” Van Sickle said. “Ursa Major is a start-up, which is definitely a little interesting coming from what we would consider a prime (player) in the aerospace world. I’ve just had a blast these last three months and I imagine it will continue to go forward.”

When Van Sickle started her master’s program in 2024, she handled government contracts for Northrup Grumman, an aerospace defense and security company. But she wanted to learn more about managing proposals, evolving technology and how to be a better leader. The MSOLS program covered those and much more.

She said the benefits were immediate. Her program gave her the opportunity to learn more about cybersecurity and artificial intelligence while connecting with people in the aerospace industry. It enhanced her project management skills. It gave her skills and knowledge that she used immediately at Northrup Grumman.

“The master’s in organizational leadership and supervision is designed to do more than build knowledge, it transforms how individuals lead, think and show up in both their professional and personal lives,” said Purdue Polytechnic Institute associate professor Katrenia Reed Hughes.

“The program equips students with practical, immediately applicable skills in areas such as communication, project leadership, and strategic decision-making, while also strengthening their confidence and sense of purpose as leaders.”

In the middle of Van Sickle’s program, the Graduate Certificate in Technical Communication became available. As someone who communicates daily about the value of her team’s services and products, she said the decision was easy.

“They were just really helpful,” Van Sickle said. “Everybody likes to think, ‘Hey, I’m the greatest writer in the world. I can do everything.’ But these classes helped me to strip back everything that I thought I knew and rebuild the best way to write something for the average layperson, who may not understand.”

She said one class project required her team to select a household appliance and translate its instructions into text that could be easily understood by an elementary school student. Her 4th grade cousin became the team’s reviewer for its waffle maker instructions.

“That was such an influential project,” Van Sickle said. “It was so funny, but being able to write information that goes to everybody, and not just a specific group of people who may already know how to do it anyways, was amazing.

“That just made things click for me and my job. One of the complaints that we got all the time on the stuff we wrote was, ‘This is great. It’s super technical and it’s fancy, but we have somebody who is going to be awarding the money off of it and they don’t understand what you’re saying.’”

As she neared the end of her program, Van Sickle decided it was time for a career change.

“I feel like everybody has that experience,” Van Sickle said. “It’s like, ‘Oh, I’ve graduated! I just have to go get a new job!’ I had a lot of great support and people said, ‘You’ve reached another level,’ but there wasn’t exactly a way for me to go forward where I was.”

She networked, looking for a role that matched her vision. Around the same time, Ursa Major was looking for someone to fill a newly created position. The timing was perfect.

“One thing about aerospace is it’s a big, old happy family,” Van Sickle said. “Everybody ends up working together. So, I put out a couple of feelers to see if I could go into a new role that fit what I wanted to do.

“My dad, also a Purdue graduate, always tells me, ‘I don’t know what I want to do when I grow up.’ And that’s the thing I operate off of, but this was something I really want to do.”

Van Sickle calls Purdue “a family school” because so many of her aunts, uncles and cousins graduated from the university. Her parents even met at Purdue in the early 1990s while completing their degrees: Ron’s in electrical and mechanical engineering, Marlene’s in accounting. They married and moved to Tipton, Ind., where Van Sickle and her sister were born, before relocating to Texas.

“But we always had close ties to Purdue.”

As a girl, Van Sickle said she hated math and writing and had a speech impediment. Her parents’ solution? Keep practicing math and present a monthly research paper on an assigned topic. In addition to improving her skills, that guidance fostered a love of learning, she said.

The Purdue connection remained in Texas: Van Sickle majored in finance at the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech, named after Purdue alumnus Jerry Rawls. When she mentioned to her mother that she was considering her master’s, her mom suggested Purdue. Van Sickle agreed.

“It changed my life,” Van Sickle said of the MSOLS program. “It changed what I thought I was going to do with my life. I had so many people reach out to me when I posted that I was going to Purdue. They said, ‘We know what you’re going through. We want to help you.’”

That is what the program is designed to do, Hughes said.

“I have had the privilege of working with many students like Sara, who fully embrace the experience and emerge with expanded opportunities, stronger professional identities and a clear vision for their future,” Hughes said. “Graduates leave not only with advanced credentials, but with a deeper understanding of how to lead with intention, navigate complexity and create positive change.”

For more information about Purdue’s online Master of Science in Organizational Leadership and Supervision, visit the program’s  website.