Nearly three decades ago, an on-campus recruiting program turned a UConn senior engineering major into a General Electric (GE) employee.

Today John Krenicki ’84 (ENG) is president and CEO of GE Energy – the multinational corporation’s energy unit – one of the world’s leading suppliers of technology, products, and services to the energy industry, and one that is on track to hit $50 billion in revenue.

“I got lucky,” Krenicki says. As luck would have it, he now runs the very part of the business where he was a trainee at the start of his GE career, today overseeing about 100,000 employees in more than 100 countries, while also serving as a vice chairman of GE.

Producing technology that supports roughly a third of the world’s electricity, GE Energy extends into just about every corner of the globe, as Krenicki can attest.

Working out of four different offices and spending 70 percent of his time traveling to such far-flung destinations as Australia, Russia, Angola, and Saudi Arabia, he has led GE Energy endeavors across the power generation, oil, and gas industries – from doubling the electricity output of Iraq to manufacturing roughly half of the wind turbines in the U.S. to providing technology for just about every major liquefied natural gas project on Earth.

“Our technology is all about how we improve efficiency, lower the cost, and make energy cleaner,” says Krenicki, who also finds time to serve on the UConn Foundation Board of Directors. And while different global regions vary in their energy needs, one thing is true around the world: “All of our customers want higher performance, reliability, efficiency, at a lower cost for consumers,” he says. “It’s a common theme pretty much everywhere in the world.”

In an ever-changing industry, Krenicki says that what he learned as an undergraduate continues to prove invaluable. “The engineering background that I have makes me comfortable with technology,” he says. “I run an organization that has almost 20,000 engineers – so sitting in a room and having some appreciation for engineering is very helpful.”

But engineering has additional benefits as a foundation for business, he says. “The reality-based, logical decision making process that you get in engineering is very helpful in business. It’s very easy when you’re running a technology enterprise to want to fall in love with the technology without asking the tough questions. And in engineering, verification is critical.”