Desire for freedom of speech lead her to studying History and Law at University of Chicago
Moving from Kolkata to Chicago
The University of Chicago takes in 1500-1700 students each year. Settling in can be an issue, as she had been in the same all- girls school and with the same set of people for 14 years. It takes time to familarise with the surrounding, finding people with similar interests. Shivani, being a city person preferred, going to this campus as it was in close proximity to Chicago. It is important to understand that in a US university, a person is expected to be more like an adult, meaning that you have to be proactive in reaching out to Professors and establishing a relationship with them.
Life on Campus
Shivani being a very bubbly and outgoing person, found the campus life a little less buzzing as it is cold all around the year, unlike other campuses in warmer climates. The feeling she felt in the US was to generally be by oneself than, than in a group.
Reflecting on Academics and how she enjoyed History
She quite enjoyed her time studying History as a Major at University of Chicago. She is currently pursuing Law from the University of Chicago. Most students who join UC are known to take up Economics or Law as their major. Though she chose Law, most of the people around her were taking Economics classes. Her history professors were quite old and the experience she got with them gave her new perspectives which she feels she would not have got anywhere else. The old professors push the students to think for themselves and find topics that they would like to present. This made her classes and the projects quite rigorous. This, she felt, made her better at analysing and skimming information.
Flow of learning over the years at UChicago
Initially, she took several different classes and slowly realized that history is what she was inclined towards, then took on more classes in that area. Out of 14 classes offered, she was to take 6 to 8 classes with a common theme. Like Europe in the 1900s, history of science or history of pandemics, world war etc. In the final year at UChicago, she was required to do a thesis. The topic she chose was “how the media portrayed Kashmir”, so picking something she was passionate about helped her improve and present a better thesis, as it is something that one does for a whole year, so suggests choosing wisely.
Studying Law at UChicago and securing a good job
She decided to pursue law after she felt she had the skills to analyse and process information quickly, along with writing a lot of research papers, while doing her history major. Since her early days, she was always keen to one day do public interest litigation in the Supreme court. So she wanted to be a lawyer. Doing graduate school is very different from undergraduation, as people are more focused. At the top six law schools, they set you up very well and one has more job offers per student than the number of students. If you are good and consistent with your grades throughout your time at the college, you are bound to get 5-7 offers at the end of campus interviews.
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.
Life-changing experiences of a Brown graduate, and the CS major which he never thought he would do
The Brown University experience
The first thing that really stood out for him was the incredible people he met, be it at student interactions, and overall. He felt that in his four years of learning, exploring and pursuing interests at Brown made a life-changing difference to him. His interactions with professors were more one to one individual basis and very accommodating.
How he chose CS and what tracks students can take
Brown has an intro sequence system, where a student can try two or three kinds of intro sequence, initially it is all fun and games inspired, where the students build projects and then a more difficult track with more complex projects. He had never thought of doing CS but possibly doing Applied Math or English. A student can take a CS concentration course, half year or full year to fast track. Once a student does one of three intro introductory sequences, they are free to explore whichever part of computer sciences one wants. The two specific tracks he picked were data science and artificial intelligence.
Brown has five core courses, which a student needs to take split amongst the core disciplines of CS, learning basic coding and how to think about algorithms, data structures and then computer systems. Further on mathematics of computer science and theory of CS. Once can also do elective courses.
With CS Major, different challenges and competitions for students
He enjoyed working in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at Brown. He was trying to look for a position initially, and stumbled upon a project doing healthcare and machine learning. Basically, trying to improve patient care using AI, doing so he decided to specialize in data science. A lot of students get involved in hackathons, a lot of extracurriculars where they might create websites or engage in competitions. Generally, just being involved in the computer science community at Brown is an enriching experience.
AI and healthcare at Flatiron health as an Intern
At Flatiron, they work towards making medicine and healthcare more personalised to patients. This is based on a lot of data collected from different patients eg. specific genes, multiple diseases etc. Using previous data to understand what test or which drug will help the patient in making a speedy recovery. Also all this data is used for development of policies, creating new drugs and researching drugs.
Advice to high schoolers keen on doing AI
Online a lot of resources are available, like the coronavirus dataset. Downloading those datasets that already exist and play around with them, gives you an idea how to analyse and conclude from them.
Life on campus at Brown
He felt the life at Brown/ America was very different from his life in Singapore. He found everyone very friendly, kind, welcoming and generous. As a freshman, he did not take up too many activities. Focused on classes and being around people from his dorm. The dorm culture is very good, but as your activities increase, one tends to understand one’s interests.
Starting on the job
Starting with the Flatiron Health data sciences team, aiming to solve health problems of cancer patients. He was most interested in the project management side of it vs the data science side. Looking forward to living in New York City and exploring the fun side of it.
Journey to writing essays to giving LSAT
The whole process, he felt, is like a lucky draw. As it is basically based on your choices, comparison of universities and courses you wish to attend. For him it was pure luck that he got into Brown, as he had seen his brother go through the whole process a few years ago. One should do their best to find your perfect place.
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.