Everybody Knows Nikshita: Student Spotlight
Towards the end of last year, Nikshita Ranganathan received good news and bad news. The good news was that she had been granted a Professional Development Award to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration, an annual conference for women and non-binary technologists organized by AnitaB.org.
The bad news was that she couldn’t fly there — her passport was temporarily held at an embassy in New York and wouldn’t be returned in time for her trip.
Nikshita knew she couldn’t miss the opportunity to network with other women in the data analytics field. She decided to make the cross-country journey to Orlando, Florida by road. “I was on a bus for three days!” she said.
Learning something from everyone
A student in Northeastern’s MPS in Analytics program, Nikshita is a big believer in face-to-face interactions and learning from everyone she meets.
She thinks talking to people, hearing their stories, and finding out about their interests and routines contributes to her personal and professional development just as much as reading books and going to classes.
It’s more of a personality trait than a networking strategy — she’s a people-person who thinks that while keeping up with graduate school can easily cause isolation, it doesn’t have to.
She knows this from personal experience. “The whole year of 2022, I used to come to class, talk to the professors, go back home, and do work. But it was very boring. I didn’t have any friends or could share anything with anyone. In 2023 I started coming to campus. I got to meet so many people, and it’s really fun now,” she said.
In May last year, she started the Northeastern University Adobe Club with her classmate Heejae Roh so that she and other students on the Silicon Valley campus could exchange tips and get better at using Adobe products together. (In addition to being the vice president of the club, Nikshita is also an Adobe Student Ambassador.)
In the months that followed, she became a Student Ambassador (a job with the university that supports Student Services) and was promoted, soon after, to work on projects directly from the Office of the Regional Dean.
Nikita and others from the Silicon Valley Student Ambassador team
Connecting students, ambassadors, and campus leadership
Her interest in people is a superpower she uses daily in her role as Student Ambassador in the Office of the Dean, a job that involves being a liaison with students, student ambassadors, and the Silicon Valley dean.
Her responsibilities include keeping the dean informed about student events and affairs, organizing events, meeting and collaborating with other student ambassadors from the campus, and having one-on-one conversations with students about issues they’re facing.
It’s a lot, but it’s nothing she can’t handle — and she loves the social aspect of the job, thanks to which, she said, “Everybody knows Nikshita and Nikshita knows everybody.”
With the Adobe Club, a Student Interest Group she helped organize
Toward a career in Data Analytics
An electrical and electronic engineer with experience working in the oil and gas industry, Nikshita came to the United States in 2022.
She decided to pursue a master’s in Analytics at Northeastern University because she had done basic data analytics at her former job and was interested in advancing her skills.
Since joining the Master of Professional Studies in Analytics program offered by the Silicon Valley campus, she has completed two internships.
One was at a non-profit energy research and development organization, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), where she helped transform raw data into insights to increase the effectiveness of the technical staff.
The other was at SiriusMindShare Lab, an ideation research and development lab geared towards small to mid-sized businesses, where, among other things, she created a chatbot leveraging natural language processing techniques to generate responses for queries based on email samples.
These, she said, were opportunities to apply the theoretical knowledge she learned in class to real-life scenarios, and again, to exchange ideas with people.
Nikshita graduates in June 2024, and is currently looking for full-time roles where she can use not just her knowledge of analytical tools, but also her people skills to make a meaningful impact.
Nikshita at the Grace Hopper Celebration
After attending the Grace Hopper Conference last year and receiving encouragement from other women in tech, she feels more confident and strong in who she is. “I am a shy person,” she said, “but now I know how to put myself forward. These are all my skills. This is all I have done so far. This is who I am.”
She hopes to attend the conference again this year, but she’d like to fly there this time. “I hope this time is easier,” she said.
It’s worth noting that not only did Nikshita make it to the conference and back over land and across an entire continent, but she also fit in another stop. On the return bus journey, she scheduled a stopover in Los Angeles. That was when she had her interview with EPRI, and was hired as an intern soon after.
With this track record, it’s hard to imagine a roadblock big enough to stop her.