Internships in the field gave him exposure to Healthcare, leading to his masters in Health Informatics

Decided to chose Cornell and how was the pace

For him, the diversity of opportunities, both academically along with the social aspect was a drawing factor. Being able to find groups of people from different walks of life interested him as he grew up in a very sheltered environment up until high school.

Cornell is a private university, but also has a lot of state schools as well. So that kind of opens up the entire environment, people coming from all sorts of backgrounds, and he attended the Arts and Sciences College, but others attend engineering, Hotel Administration, Agriculture and Life Sciences, creating a very vibrant community.

Initial thoughts and how his four years were as Economics major

He did economics in 11th and 12th but it was very different from what Cornell had to offer. In school we learnt the processes of Economics in a simple way, but the subject itself is very vast. But knowing that it helps with the college applications. At Cornell, economics is fundamentally a  math subject in its application, micro or macro scale, it is a wide topic. Taking it as a major, it helped him to focus on specific parts of it, like a particular model made in a statistical method to understand how things work in the countries.

Academics itself is not enough, what one gets is a well rounded 3-4 years. The elements of doing research for a professor in different departments or for understanding the subject or its sub-sections assist in getting a better sense of the subject. Once you do research, it opens up your eyes to different careers such as investment banking, finance, consulting, investment banking clubs. Joining clubs of similar interest makes it a holistic learning experience. 

Master’s in health informatics from Cornell

After completing his Bachelors, he took on a role in management consulting, which was data heavy work in healthcare, with focus on growth and strategy. Doing this work made him feel that he needed a more technical skill, as he enjoyed doing statistics, healthcare came as a more relevant field. This aspect was different from general technological applications like biomedical devices in bio engineering or cellular biology, bioinformatics, etc. his interest was focused on data science. The program in broad terms covers different aspects of healthcare organizations working. The program is a part of the Graduate School of Medical Sciences, the focus was to get fundamentals in terms of biostatistical data mining, some machine learning, and predictive modeling.

Health informatics in primarily in pharmaceutical companies

The groups are based on the work and analysis done by an economic consulting firm. Litigation disputes, hire an economic expert to testify on matters related to property, market competition, insurance etc. but a big part is Life Sciences and pharmaceutical companies called Health economics and outcome research. Like if a new drug gets approved by regulatory bodies, insurance must pay for the drug to be listed, sponsored by hospitals and doctors to prescribe. If the insurance companies do not pay, then the drug cannot go to the market. So, the purpose is to provide enough scientific evidence and data to show its viability and effectiveness.

Moving to the East coast 

He moved from Cornell to other cities and is currently in San Francisco where he is working. San Francisco is a great city, very different from  New York city, he feels. He felt that the West Coast culture is a lot different from the East coast. The reason he feels this way is that as he spent his time in college and New York city, it is a part of his personality. San Francisco is a Tech city so most of the people around are software engineers with very different personality traits. The work he does is quantitative but not the same as software engineers, so he feels he needs to start from scratch. Though different, the city has a lot to offer, and he is keen to explore them more.