Kabita Rokka is president of the Supply Chain and Transportation Club. She also founded the Nepalese Student Association, enrolled in the RISE Academy and has participated in several supply chain research projects. (Photo by Derik Holtmann)

On particularly clear days, Kabita Rokka could look out the window in her home in Kathmandu, Nepal, and see the snow-capped Himalayan mountain range in the distance, towering over the green hills north of the city.

“It is a very beautiful view that you can see the mornings,” said Rokka, who this semester is finishing her master’s in supply chain and analytics from the University of Missouri–St. Louis. “I do miss that.”

Growing up in her country’s capital city, her parents always encouraged Rokka to prioritize her education, and she was the first in her family to pursue a college degree. With her inexhaustible level of self-motivation – a character trait that would be on display every day of her UMSL career – one degree was not enough. Rokka earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration and two different master’s degrees, one in economics and one in public administration, from Tribhuvan University in Nepal. While studying, she started her own business, Kabita Henna Studios, to satiate her artistic side, and she also worked full-time during grad school.

A major part of her role at Advance Care Agency, an Australian company she worked for remotely, was handling all aspects of the company’s supply chain, from negotiating with suppliers to planning inventory and everything else. She loved the challenge and saw it as her next career path, while realizing that her degrees had not specifically prepared her to take those next steps.

Rokka considered pursuing her doctorate in Nepal, but those PhD programs required an eight-year commitment. While exploring opportunities in the United States, she was drawn to the University of Missouri System and was particularly impressed with UMSL’s Department of Supply Chain and Analytics. She joined the master’s program starting in August 2023 and soon earned graduate research assistantship, which typically go to PhD students.

“For master’s students to get these assistantships, they have to be outstanding,” said Haitao Li, UMSL’s supply chain and analytics department chair. “Kabita was one of the very few.”

Rokka excelled in UMSL’s program, in large part because of her longstanding approach to education – it’s not about just getting the degree but making sure she fully understands the subject matter on both deep and fundamental levels. Through a connection that Li made with Robert Sotelo, the senior director of global supply chain at Bruker Corporation, Rokka landed an interview with Bruker. That interview process was confirmation that she made the right choice in UMSL.

“When my recruiter was asking questions, all my coursework was running through my mind, like, ‘Oh, I read this in the one class,’ or, ‘This professor told me about that subject!’” she said. “One question about suppliers, that was Professor Temidayo Akenroye’s course, and for logistics, Professor Siqiang Guo’s and Professor James Campbell’s course. I feel like our supply chain and analytics program is really a job-ready program.”

Rokka landed the position in the Nano Surfaces & Metrology division. She started part-time in early April – while she’s finishing her master’s program – and will be full-time when she graduates.

“My role is as a service planner, so I will be looking at the demand planning, inventory allocations and the distributions of those things to the customers and to the distribution center,” she said. “Bruker has many distribution centers and warehouses within the U.S., and they have one in St. Louis as well. I will be working with the material resource planner, so I will be looking at the overall distributions not only in Missouri, but the USA overall.”

Li and others in the supply chain department were thrilled for Rokka.

“I was very excited,” Li said. “This is amazing. This is the fruit right of not only our program, but also these industry connections our department has. For Kabita, it’s about motivation, self-driven motivation, proactive learning rather than reactive. That’s really important. We would love to have more students like Kabita, knowing what she wants coming here from a country thousands of miles away. Here we provide that environment, that support through our state-of-the-art curriculum and student-focused faculty who really care about students, not only in the classroom but also outside.”

Rokka certainly made the most of her time at UMSL both inside and outside the classroom.

“I can’t stay idle. I have spare time, like two or three days in a week, then I think I should do something,” Rokka said. “When I see something interesting, I really want to do that, learn about that, and that’s how all my diplomas happened. With all those things, I think ‘I am here, where I am supposed to be, and maybe in the future, I will be in a different place.’ Sometimes I feel like I’m doing too much to myself, but then I feel like if I don’t do anything, I will be mad.”

In her first year at UMSL, Rokka had the opportunity to work closely with Andrea Hupman, an associate professor in the supply chain department who played an instrumental role in shaping her understanding of supply chain risk and resiliency.

“Professor Hupman’s guidance gave me a foundational lens to approach uncertainties in the supply chain,” Rokka said. “Her mentorship helped me see the bigger picture of how resilient systems can support sustainable operations.”

This early exposure became a cornerstone for her later achievements. She collaborated on a research project with Guo and Li titled “Reverse Logistics of Wind Turbines in the United States,” which examines the logistical and environmental challenge of decommissioning wind turbines, with blades up to 130 meters long.

“Our study looks at how to design a more efficient reverse logistics network for transporting, recycling, or repurposing turbine components,” Rokka said. “We also examined the economic costs of decommissioning and highlighted gaps in current research, such as the lack of intermodal transportation use. Presenting this at UMSL’s Research and Innovation Reception poster session was a great experience.”

She also is part of a group of UMSL supply chain students participating in The Fresh Connection Inchainge Global Student Competition. The group took second place in the local competition, then finished 13th of 140 teams in the global qualification round, advancing to the finals.

“Advancing to the global finals has been such a thrilling and rewarding journey,” Rokka said. “The simulation challenges teams to manage a virtual supply chain company in real time requiring strategic decision-making in procurement, production, distribution and finance. It’s a rigorous test of collaboration, analytical thinking and adaptability under pressure. Making it to the finals is a huge accomplishment, and I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved as a team so far.

The group will compete in the global finals May 12-16.

Rokka is also president of the Supply Chain and Transportation Club, and she enrolled in the RISE Academy program. When she started at UMSL, she quickly connected with a few other students from Nepal, and the longer she was here, the more connections she found with her home country. For Rokka, it was only natural to start the Nepalese Student Association.

“I realized that the way I miss the home, they are also missing home, too, so if we can come together and celebrate some of our biggest festivals together here, that would be really nice,” Rokka said. “When I started the processes for the Nepalese Student Association, I realized there were like, 30-plus people, from PhD, post-doc students to professors and everything. Last semester, we celebrated the biggest festivals of our country, Dashain and Tihar. We were celebrating it like we used to do it in the home country, and everybody was so happy.”

Her view out the window might be a little different than it was in Kathmandu, but the same mindset that made her a success in Nepal is working for Rokka in the United States, too.