Venkatesan Narayanan ’25

After earning a bachelor’s in computer science at Hindustan University, Venkatesan Narayanan built a career as head of supply chain and operations for an online grocery in India. After nine years in the role, he was ready to take the next step in his career, and for that, he’d need an MBA.

“I liked the looks of LeBow’s course of study, and the professors in management and supply-chain related courses had done good amount of research.”

He completed the MBA in 2025 and promptly landed a job as a supply chain manager at Amazon, where supply-chain management is a critical business function. Given the vast scale of the online retailer’s efforts, and the complexities of same-day delivery in North America, Narayanan has to bring a range of abilities to the table.

“The Amazon network is big: Everything here is measured in millions and billions,” he says. “So you need lot of technical skills to work in this role. You need to know statistics, you need to have good analytical skills, you need to know Python,” a programming language used to analyze data, automate processes and build predictive models.

His prior work experience had taken him part way there, and the LeBow MBA filled in the gaps. That training has helping him thrive in his current job.

“For same-day delivery, the products and all the fulfillment centers have to have the right amount of inventory. You need to know how that inventory reaches the various places, what quantity is required, and so on,” he says. “This role requires a lot of analytical skills and familiarly with a lot of supply-chain concepts.”

A number of key LeBow experiences helped to prime him for success in this role, starting with management information systems, where Vice Dean and Professor of MIS Murugan Anandarajan, PhD, has ensured that the course material addresses current business needs.

“He has updated the coursework with relevant information on applying Artificial Intelligence to business problems,” Narayanan says. “Amazon is scaling up with AI — everything is AI now. If you are not using it, you cannot keep up.”

Another particularly impactful experience came via Clinical Professor of Management David Kurz’s supply chain digital transformation course. The digital evolution of the supply chain is a complex area, “and he got into the nuances, which really helped me to connect with what Amazon is doing. I feel I’m able to make impactful comments in meetings here.”

LeBow was especially supportive of Narayanan’s experiences as an international student. In addition to professors always being readily available, “they also have a career development course as part of the MBA, to help us position ourselves,” he said. “It covers how the academics here work, how you need to build your resume for U.S. jobs, all the things you need to know.”

Narayanan was also active in the Drexel International Graduate Student Association. “It gave us all a place to share our experiences,” he says. “That is really helpful, because you need the chance to hang with peers in the international student community.”

Between the career-focused coursework and the active support for students coming from abroad, LeBow put Narayanan in a place where he could hit the ground running. The MBA experience helped him not just to grasp the technical underpinnings of the work, but to ready himself for a career outside his native country.

“Coming from India, I felt I lacked confidence with respect to the U.S. work culture and the big tech companies,” he says. “The MBA program gave me the confidence to face these challenges, and to position myself better in this work culture.”