This journey has been a long time coming! I am honored and proud to share that I have been accepted to Kellogg School of Management with the Dean’s Leadership Award. This is more than a dream come true, and I am really looking forward to becoming part of this community to maximize my impact on the world.

When I was a child, I wanted to be a pilot, an ISRO scientist; as I grew older, I wanted to be the Chief Minister of my state and the Prime Minister of my country; as I grew even older, I wanted to become one of the very top executives of a sprawling company; finally, when I was in high school, I wanted to study engineering at a premier institution, to be at the top of my class and to work at a company doing meaningful work, more on this later. As you can tell, my ambitions have changed over time, and many of them don’t even seem to have a throughline. However, something that I felt sure about was the impact I wanted to have – be it through the private sector or public service. I was the first person in my family to go to college; most of the older figures in my life took after their dad’s jobs, and their dads moved from small villages to small towns when farming became unviable in their small village. Most people I knew growing up did not leave my region, let alone my state or my country. As a 28-year old, I have come to understand that this is okay, and I may even venture to say that it is normal. However, given my recent admittance to Kellogg, a milestone that my 10-year-old self would have marveled at, I wanted to share this so that anyone would consider my journey as an additional data point.

Going back to the meaningful work piece I touched on earlier, I did not have any idea of what it would or could be. In boarding school, I started learning about their lives and began thinking about my family and everything we have been through thus far. Although it may sound trivial, I had to go through many ups and downs to realize that I could not simply go from being in high school or college to running a company, a state, or a country and that there was no silver bullet. Combining these two pieces – my family’s background and my realization about the non-existence of a magic pill -, I slowly came to pick energy and climate as the areas to do meaningful work. As I wrote in my earlier blog post, Unveiling the Journey: Navigating Career Pivots, Setbacks, and Triumphs, despite having shown some signs of upward movement in my career, I was waiting for a perfect carrier or the aforementioned magic pill to transform my career. It was when I realized that I drive my own career and that different phases of my career will need vessels of different sizes and capacities; I began to move the vessel with ease and with as little resistance as possible and began to see the wake of the positive impact my vessel was leaving. My alma mater wrote about my work and what I call my origin story here in this post for the alum magazine.

I began discovering all the nuances and enjoyed mastering them before prematurely wanting a bigger vessel. I started to enjoy sailing on my vessel and appreciate the wake of impact without losing sight of what was ahead. I now feel that I am ready to move on to a bigger vessel, one that creates a large wake of positive impact, a wake that traverses miles and a time. This journey has always been about maximizing my impact on the world, and I am humbled and thrilled to embark on this next and exciting leg of the voyage at Kellogg with renewed purpose and a stronger vessel than ever before! I want to thank my people, my partner Emily, my parents and siblings, who have always stood by me and believed in me through tough times and hardship; I couldn’t have done it without you all!