Advancing Her Career Through an Advanced Degree
Data Scientist, Google
An increase in work responsibilities led Nithya Mahadevan to pursue a graduate degree in computational decision science and operations research.
Nithya Mahadevan (M.S. COMPUTATIONAL DECISION SCIENCE AND OPERATIONS RESEARCH ’18)Nithya Mahadevan (M.S. CDSOR ’18) was in her fifth year of working for Mu Sigma when she decided to go back to school to get her master’s degree.
She had held increasingly responsible positions in business analytics at Mu Sigma, a leading decision sciences and big data analytics company. She earned her undergraduate degree in electronics engineering at Visvesvaraya Technological University.
At Mu Sigma, she says, “We were motivated to self-learn topics like machine learning and data mining. I wanted to do an advanced degree that would enable me to scale in the stream of decision sciences. I talked to people, trying to decide what I should do my master’s in. My mentors back at Mu Sigma suggested that I look at operations research.”
When her husband moved to Chicago, Illinois Tech came up on her radar.
“What struck me about Illinois Tech’s CDSOR program was that it had this well-designed component of decision sciences,” she says. “I really like that it doesn’t just touch upon one aspect of computer science. The program provides a great mix of math, business, and computer science.”