Sahana Kumar ’23

After graduating RV College of Engineering in India in 2020, Sahana Kumar went to work at a clean-energy startup, where she fell in love with data-driven insights.

She’d worked with data before, but at the startup, she says, “I had the flexibility to coordinate with different teams, and I was exposed more to data and business analytics.”

She loved it enough to want to go deeper into the subject, and an advanced degree seemed the next logical step. “I started to see how much having a solid foundation could really help. There were so many exciting opportunities popping up in data, and getting a degree just felt like the right move to really build that confidence and take things to the next level,” she says.

Kumar made a big leap, coming to study in the U.S. from India, and says that LeBow helped to ease transition.

“LeBow’s Graduate Student Services and Drexel’s International Students and Scholars Services were incredibly helpful,” she says. “You always feel like you have enough information and that they’re always there for you.”

Her studies at LeBow led to her current role as a data engineering associate at Wells Fargo, where she is focused on the intersection of cybersecurity and artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML).

In large corporate networks, there can be literally millions of digital events happening every day. While humans can’t parse activity at that scale, AI can read all that data and catch the outliers, the anomalous behavior that indicates potential trouble. “With AI/ML, there is definitely an advanced way of doing things, and that is what we are primarily trying to explore,” she says.

In support of that work, “I focus primarily on building data pipelines and handling data ingestion. But thanks to my analytics background, I also take on analytical tasks like dashboarding, visualization, and making sense of the data once it’s flowing.”

A variety of experiences at LeBow helps to set Kumar up for success in this field, beginning in her very first academic quarter with a class on management information systems led by Murugan Anandarajan, PhD, vice dean and professor of MIS.

“That class was really inspiring. He had a way of explaining why we are doing what we are doing, and there was also a group project focused on hands-on experience,” she says. “In that project, we studied the data of students working on co-op, doing sentiment analysis and some text analysis… It helped me to see how much we can do with just a little data, and the way he explained it to us was really impressive. That stayed with me.”

At the tail end of her LeBow experience, Kumar took another class that had a big impact: Negotiation for Leaders, with Professor of Management Jonathan Ziegert, PhD.

In the business world, the skills of “negotiation” — concepts like BATNA, the Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement — go well beyond bargaining over salary.

“It was more about having a meaningful and respectful conversation with someone, and those skills apply to every interaction.”