Lewis Alumni Feature: John Szatkowski ’00

 John Szatkowski ’00

Oftentimes, when students prepare to go to college, they find it difficult to decide what they want to do for the rest of their life. This was no different for John Szatkowski ’00 who enrolled at Lewis with an undeclared major his freshman year.

He was able to dabble in all the things he enjoyed and stayed quite busy playing club volleyball, performing in a few bands, participated, working in the theatre and more. Later that year, John got the unique opportunity to work for UPS at O’Hare International Airport and says, “the smell of jet-fuel in the morning got him hooked!”

John received his flight dispatcher license in his last semester before graduating from Lewis with a bachelor’s degree in Aviation Administration. Afterwards, he moved to Seattle to work for a small startup airline. Less than a year later, he moved back to Chicago and began working at Chicago Express Airlines. He stayed there for about 5 years, through the downturn of September 11, as well as the closure of that airline in 2005.

This experience plus his graduate studies at DePaul University launched his interest in information technology. John used his wide range of skills to turn slow days in the field into learning experiences.

“Unless we had a ‘bad day’ with irregular operations at the airline, I sometimes would get bored. I was continuously looking for ways to automate and optimize the way we did our work.”

It was that drive to learn that allowed him to further his career and easily transition into new roles. He went on to work at Mesa Air Group in a number of areas including operations analysis, automation, and air traffic management. From there, he was recruited as a product manager for WSI corporation which ultimately became The Weather Company. John now holds a senior leadership role within Travel and Transportation at IBM.

John’s role has evolved a lot over the past year in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. Since last summer, his main focus has been on the digitization of travel credentials and helping airlines, airports, governments, and healthcare all come together to bring what was previously a stretch of a concept into reality in a fairly short order.

John has taken his many years of experience, along with the foundation of knowledge he gained 20 years ago at Lewis, and continues to apply it to his everyday work.

“The core of my meteorological knowledge started at Lewis, grew during practice with the airlines, and, ultimately, prepared me to have routine conversations with PHD level meteorologists to help define better predictive models for things which impact flights such as turbulence, icing, freezing rain, fog, and more. If you walk into most of the airline operation control centers or cockpits here in the United States, many globally – there is a good chance you are seeing flight tracking, aviation forecasting, and pilot products that I help lead the development of.”

John would like to offer two pieces of advice to all current and future Flyers: 1) Change is constant, and it is important to be able to adapt and work on something that matters and 2) There are very few degrees of separation – treat every contact you make with respect.

Understanding these two concepts helped John build a successful career and make Lewis University proud.