Student Profile: The Broader SOM Experience

Neha Bhaskar ’09
Post SOM Employment: Product Manager, Microsoft Corp.
Club Leadership: Technology Club, Student Rep for the US India Political Action Committee at SOM

Before I came to SOM, I worked at a subsidiary of Microsoft in India in sales (as a software asset management team leader.) After graduation, I will be working with Microsoft in Redmond. It is not a common transition to come to Corp HQ from a subsidiary, or to move from being a team leader in inside sales into the role of product manager in the Business Group. It isn’t a career switch in the sense of changing industries, but it is a major change in terms of career growth. SOM certainly accelerated that.

Before SOM I had limited experience working in globally cross-cultural teams. I also didn’t have any experience working in a developed economy, or looking at things from that perspective. India is a fast-growing economy, but it is a very different place than the U.S. Just being here the first year, just being in the lectures and understanding the world view from the U.S. perspective, was eye-opening for me.

People at SOM are very, very friendly. It is a small school and everyone knows everyone. It is like a community where people help each other out.

The faculty has been great. The teaching style here is different from India because it is very discussion-oriented and much more informal. It is a good mixture of cases and lectures, depending on the particular class. It’s usually a lot more fun than what I was used to. It was also great to be able to take courses in other departments at Yale outside of SOM.

I was a co-chair of the organizing committee for the first Yale SOM India Conference, sponsored by the South Asian Business Forum, which is one of the student clubs. It’s very important to bring India to students here, especially in the current economic scenario. There is some concern in India about the economic crisis, but there are still a lot of opportunities.

I am also a co-leader of the Technology Club. We organized the Microsoft Firenze Case Competition at SOM for the first time. I think it speaks volumes about student interest in business case competitions because more students took part in the competition at SOM than at any other school, even though we have the smallest class size out of all the other participating schools. It gave me a lot of experience in organizing things and marketing the competition to our school.

You can make a lot out of experiences at Yale SOM outside the classroom. Those experiences — whether it was organizing the conference or organizing the case competition or being involved in the SOM community — gave me a lot of practical understanding that complemented the classroom study.

Interviewed on April 14, 2009.