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. 

Journey of Vassar's 1st International President of the Student Council

Early days in Vassar

Went into Vassar with no expectations, only knowing it was Liberal Arts college and had seen some pictures on the internet. The campus was beautiful, with very welcoming and supportive people around. They had separate orientation for international students and then regular orientation. Having very regular interactions with professors and being in a 10% classroom, developed our relationship with them very well. They have several events on campus which were a mix of adjusting and forming bonds at an early stage. 

Resources available at Vassar for the two Majors

Anish’s interests in political science and economics were very different but he wanted to learn them more and decided to do a major in both. Economics he had done in school before so had some ideas, but political science he had never done. In the first semester he took both and his interest grew so decided to do them. He spent an hour discussing a doubt which he thought would be cleared in a minute or two. 

He was most influenced by his close friends and professors, shared experiences and learnt a lot of different perspectives. It was all a very meaningful exchange. With his professors, he would spend hours talking and listening to music, having a very fun relationship. 

Manage time while doing two majors

Graduation requirements at Vassar are very little, one needs to take one class in each division. The curriculum is not very rigid and one has complete freedom to explore whatever you want specifically in political science. The topics covered were comparative politics, political theory, and so on, and so forth. So the thing students focused on was a subset of all of that, which was post colonial theory which he had chosen to study further. Like how colonialism and imperialism in many ways have shaped our world and ways of thinking. So in theory, dealing with the subset and to recognize and pushback against it. In economics, one has micro, macro, micro finance, his focus was on macro. The overlap is that one doesn’t go without the other. 

Refugee Initiative and Student Government 

Co-founded the refugee initiative with a professor. Today it is a seven college consortium funded by Mellon Foundation for $1.5 million. The beauty at Vassar is that they have the professors to guide and the structure available to do something meaningful, everyone will support you. There were challenges from time to time. They opened a resettlement office in the local community and resettled a few people. A lot of language exchanges where the refugees taught us Arabic and we taught them English, we helped them get jobs, arranged interviews, artist exchanges over summer, even helped some get on track for college education. Some forced migrants had bigger challenges in the world, some were inter-border migrants like in Indian states, Syrian or American or German, in these situations they come to the border, and want to call your home as their home. A lot of push back comes, against it based on the history of your country. The depth of it he found quite mind-boggling. 

1st International President of the Student Government at Vassar

Most pivotal experiences of college life, he had as the President of the Student Government. Due to the position, he got to sit in the Board of Trustees meetings as well as all student organizations. They had close to a million dollar budget, which they had complete independence over whom to allocate. The main task was finding a balance of activism and real need for social justice, and making sure the administration understood it. The trustees were from different walks of life, like one grew up in France, there was a former chief economist of World bank, a person who ran a theatre in Broadway. 

Rapid Fire 

Three adjectives that define him/ his strengths, would be the desire to learn, then leadership component and third was analysis. 

Advice to high school students 

The biggest thing he feels is not to stress and so do your research. He did not put in effort to apply and somehow still got in. Had no idea where he would join but those are all circumstantial things that turned out quite well for him. He advises not to overthink or go overboard with too much information. One never knows enough or you’re never going to know it all. He encourages students to be courageous and don’t do what people expect you to do but what you want to do.