Hometown:
New Delhi, India
Tell us about your job.
Deloitte is the largest professional services organization in the world, and one of the biggest government consultants with clients across the civil, local, state, and federal levels. My role is within the Technology Services Optimization alignment in the Enterprise Performance offering. The TSO Core works towards improving the delivery of public services by leveraging cutting-edge technology to optimize organizational performance across different levels of the government, health and human services, defense, and educational institutions by providing relevant, timely and sustainable solutions.
What skills from the MPA program do you use in your work?
I cultivated essential qualitative and quantitative skills via the MPA program. As the nature of the program inherently requires dialogue and class participation, my public speaking skills greatly improved over the course of the year, and in turn, so did my overall professional and client-facing persona. The multiple memos I wrote for different policy analysis classes over the course of the year honed my case analysis skills. This was particularly valuable during the interview processes and is transferable to any sector within the consulting industry.
Classes such as Statistical Machine Learning, Statistics for Public Policy, and International Finance elective helped me gain some valuable quantitative skills in data analysis, such as Python, descriptive and inferential statistics, program evaluation, and multivariate analysis. These quantitative methods and tools allowed me to hit the ground running.
Where did you fulfill your MPA consultancy and how did the experience prepare you for the work you are doing now?
I completed my consultancy at Greenmantle Consulting, a macroeconomic consulting firm based in New York. For the final project, I worked on creating a quarterly GDP-predicting framework for Brazil and reporting on the country's political economy and ongoing macroeconomic trends.
This involved using Stata to create the model and populating the model with macroeconomic information from data repositories such as the Banco Central do Brazil and Federal Reserve Economic Data. In addition, I had to familiarize myself with the Brazilian political climate, regularly read news, and closely track Central Bank activity.
This experience provided an opportunity to apply both qualitative and quantitative skills cultivated over the year to analyze a real-world situation. After building the model, I had to report my findings in a 4-page memo. This process of analyzing data, digesting it, and then synthesizing and communicating information in a concise manner while providing insights is a substantial part of my current role and the consultancy experience was instrumental in preparing me for it,
What has been the most impactful project you’ve worked so far at your job?
Deloitte is one of the biggest US government contractors, and the firm has worked on several impactful projects at various levels of the government. The firm collaborated with a large IT company to implement cloud computing software to modernize a Statewide Medicaid Enterprise system. At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Deloitte helped optimize the technical framework for state clients that helped them process the large volume of applications being filed. More recently, the firm consulted on the modernization of a State-level client’s child support system, helping improve performance, enhance customer service, and provide a system that helps meet the program’s current and future goals and needs. The firm also has several projects which offer pro-bono consulting to various non-profits across the country. Following an intense training phase, I hope to work on a similarly rewarding project that has a wide impact on the improvement of public services.
What was the highlight of your experience at Brown?
Being a part of the Brown University community helped me engage with some exceptional minds and forge lifelong connections. Thanks to the diversity in our cohort, I had the opportunity to hear a wide variety of opinions on various global issues which in turn helped me improve my perspective. Additionally, I coveted the opportunity to learn under the guidance of incredibly accomplished and knowledgeable professors such as Dr. John Friedman — who taught Statistics for Public Policy and served as Special Assistant to President Obama on the White House National Economic Council, and Professor Manuel Lancastre, who taught my International Finance elective and served as the Secretary of State of Economy for Portugal.
What advice would you give to young professionals entering the MPA program?
The MPA program offers you the opportunity to customize your experience, and my advice to students entering the program would be to leverage Brown University’s vast resources to do so. Make sure to connect and engage with the renowned faculty, who are some of the world’s brightest minds and are leaders in their respective fields. I would also advise them to set goals as to what they want to accomplish by the end of the program and so it is important to organize and manage their time and activities in pursuit of these objectives.