We all learn from reflecting on our experiences. While we can share our wisdom and insights with others, they may only fully appreciate the true value of our words when they experience something similar. On April 3, 2020, the MBS team provided a platform for experienced alumni and a soon-to-be alumna to share their teachings with current students as they prepare for their post-MBS futures.
Hosted by Abbe Rosenthal, PCC, Assistant Director/Head of Corporate Partnerships, Employment & Professional Development, and Executive Coach, hosted the inaugural "Virtual Friday: MBS Alumni Career Stories” panel (the second Virtual Friday is this week, on April 17) , the event was a huge success, with more than 150 students logging on to hear words of wisdom from Vishala Maharaj, Namrita Gupta, and Tiffany Tsui.
Vishala Maharaj MBS’17 works as a scent design associate at International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF) – one of top four Flavor & Fragrance companies worldwide.
Vishala Maharaj MBS’17, presently a scent design associate at International Flavors & Fragrances (IFF), graduated from MBS with a concentration in Personal Care Science. While she always was interested in chemistry and wanted to explore her options in the field, the MBS curriculum steered her interests through the personal care cosmetic science courses. Vishala shared her transformative experience, and how MBS enabled her to make the professional leap from high school teacher to working in her current role at IFF. She spoke about discovering her passion in exploring the world of fragrances and understanding how it impacts various industries and products we use in our day-to-day lives. Vishala credits landing her job at IFF—and her subsequent professional growth within the fragrance industry – to her persistence, her networking, and in focusing on her end goal of securing a job at a leading firm. Vishala also highlighted the value of connections she made as an MBS student: through her personal care science professor, she met an industry hiring manager—an introduction that ultimately led to her first job in the Flavor & Fragrance industry. With the challenges of COVID-19, Vishala is grateful for the steps taken by IFF to make it possible for her to continue her work without having to go into the office. Her transition to work remotely took some effort, as smell is sometimes difficult to express in words, thus challenging her to improve her communication skills. She cannot imagine a day without her sense of smell as that is the core part of her job.
Namrita Gupta has held leadership positions as a data scientist professionally as well as during her MBS externships and internships.
Namrita Gupta will be graduating from MBS in just a few short weeks with a concentration in Analytics. Her prior experience at Mu Sigma Inc. in India as a Business Analyst for around two years helped her in developing her analytical skills as she worked on client projects and business requirements. She then started her role as an assistant manager at WNS Global Services, where she worked in the retail analytics domain, covering campaign and loyalty management, ad hoc client requests and trend analysis. Namrita highly recommends planning for the semester in advance as it helped her to concentrate and prioritize her time based on her goals. She was recognized by the PSM program with an Externship fellowship award for her commendable role as an extern lead at Stryker Corporation, where her team helped in improving the data quality in the data governance model for medical products’ lifecycle management. Not only did she manage her schedule between academics and the MBS Externship Exchange, but she was also involved as a data scientist intern with CIEK Solutions. In her final semester, Namrita has been a revenue-management intern at Hapag-Lloyd and looks forward to what is in store after her graduation.
Tiffany Tsui MBS’13 is contributing in creating global impact as a program manager at Google.
Tiffany Tsui MBS’13, who graduated with a concentration in Kinesiology and Applied Physiology, currently works as a program manager at Google. She completed her undergraduate studies in exercise science and kinesiology prior to entering the MBS program. During her time at Rutgers as both an undergraduate and graduate student, she worked as a lab supervisor for the Office of Information Technology (OIT) for around four years. She believes that this experience enabled her to have a good understanding of how each component worked individually, and how to put them together in a way that made the system work faster and more efficiently as a whole—an understanding that eased her transition from kinesiology to computing. During her internships in the MBS program, Tiffany realized that working in fitness centers was not necessarily a part of her career goals, so she explored a role at Stanford University in Computing for two years.
Tiffany says she owes her current role at Google to her ongoing desire to learn and grow. She says that after four years in her previous position as a platforms management specialist, she felt she had reached the limit of what she could learn in that role; thus, she wanted to secure a role where she could practice and grow her technical and management skills further. Her close involvement with Google’s internal telephony team while working on launching the Pixel Phones enabled her to transfer to a program manager role on the telephony team. She believes the internships through the MBS Internships Program played a crucial role in her success. “Being hands on in those environments was pivotal in helping me realize that working in a fitness center was limiting me,” says Tiffany. “I knew that I was capable of having a larger, global impact. Google is a global company and the work that I do is not only impactful but gets magnified multiple times over.”
Vishala, Namrita, and Tiffany left the students with the following advice from their varied experiences:
- Be perseverant
- Focus on your end-goal
- Plan your time as much as you can
- Network, network, network
- Be clear and communicative in all professional interactions
Stay updated for similar upcoming experiential learning MBS Events—including this week’s Virtual Friday: Alumni Career Stories, which will be held on April 17.