My Experiences in Amazon Operations: Anecdotes and Answers from a Sloan Alum (Who Happens to be a Transgender Veteran)

Willow Primack is a 2015 graduate of MIT Leaders for Global Operations, including a Sloan MBA and an M. Eng in Course 2. Prior to her arrival at MIT, Willow was a Captain in the Army's Military Police Corps, having commissioned through West Point in 2008. Her service included a deployment to Kandahar, Afghanistan.

Willow interned at Amazon during her time at MIT, writing her thesis on the mechanics of buffer and routing logic in the systems that sort products for customer orders at an Amazon fulfillment center. She joined Amazon after graduation and has managed a team at an experimental design of a fulfillment center, supervised a department at a large fulfillment center, developed processes and training for inventory control, and led the company's site for live testing of advanced robotics prototypes. She is currently the Assistant General Manager at an Amazon Robotics fulfillment center in Connecticut.

Willow is also the first openly transgender graduate of LGO and Sloan. Amazon strives to be a company of builders who bring varying backgrounds, ideas, and points of view to inventing on behalf of its customers. The company's diverse perspectives come from many sources including gender, race, age, national origin, sexual orientation, culture, education, as well as professional and life experience. Diversity and Inclusion are not only part of the company's culture, but also leadership principles. Willow has been profiled on the front page of Amazon's internal website as an example of leaders representing diversity and has conducted a company ask-me-anything discussion for LGBTQ issues in the workplace as part of an internal diversity initiative. She was an Amazon representative at the 2017 Human Rights Campaign (HRC) National Dinner where Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos received HRC's Equality Award.

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