Tejas Karwa is a fourth-year industrial engineering student set to complete his PlusOne Degree in data analytics engineering in May of 2024. He has a passion for the outdoors and a love for all things hiking, skiing, biking, golfing, and tennis. Growing up in Westchester, New York, Tejas always knew he wanted to be an engineer. Soon after beginning college, he realized his main interest in engineering lay within the development for improvement processes, leading him to industrial engineering.
In his classes, he has loved learning how to conceptualize and approach problems as well as look for trends and patterns in data. Tejas has found his graduate classes to be the most interesting, including Computation and Visualization for Analytics with Professor Mohammad Dehghani and Foundations of Data Analytics with Professor Sri Radhakrishnan, as they are directly related to his interests in analytics. He has loved not only learning analytics and visualization tools, but also developing a data science focused mindset. Even Tejas’ extracurriculars show his interest in analytics; Tejas has held several roles in Generate, an entrepreneurial product development group at Northeastern, including Data Analyst and Data and Strategy Lead. In his lead position, he exercised his management skills to plan out the entire year of projects as well as hire and assign people to specific roles on each project.
Over his time at Northeastern, Tejas has completed two co-ops and a summer internship. His first co-op role was the Data Analytics Co-op at John Hancock as part of the Advanced Analytics team. In this role, he leveraged Python and Tableau to build producer relationships and perform strategic analysis. He was able to use Tableau to create a much more effective communication pathway of client business activity, providing insight on client needs and progress to executives. Additionally, he built a massive producer-centric SQL table to analyze the KPIs and revenue over time of each producer. Tejas truly enjoyed working with such a collaborative and supportive team on this co-op, especially as his experience at John Hancock sparked his love of data analytics. His second co-op was at Boston Consulting Group as a Data Engineer Co-op. There, he replaced two full weeks of manual data entry by engineering an ETL process using Python to load mapped data into Snowflake. He also helped to reduce data integrity errors by 80% by collaborating with software engineers to establish a backend API which, among other things, helps to keep data from being overwritten. Most recently, Tejas completed a Data Engineering internship at Amazon, where he implemented an AWS QuickSight dashboard in order to track ETL job failure 15% faster than previous methods. Additionally, he spearheaded a Proof-of-Concept data pipeline management system to decrease pipeline downtime.
“…my experience with Galante – especially through guest speaker events – has shown me that there are so many opportunities beyond what my degree has prepared me for.”
Though Tejas has thoroughly enjoyed his time in his engineering-based classes and co-ops, he knew he wanted to holistically understand the industry in order to eventually manage projects and drive initiatives in a company. This pushed him to join the Galante Engineering Business Program. Through the Galante Program, Tejas has been to several guest speaker events, which he found absolutely illuminating. “As an engineer, I used to think my degree defined the limits of my career. However, my experience with Galante – especially through guest speaker events – has shown me that there are so many opportunities beyond what my degree has prepared me for.” His piece of advice to other industrial engineering students is “absolutely don’t limit yourself to what you think your major has prepared you for.” Though Tejas only joined the Galante Program in the fall of 2022, he has already made considerable contributions to the program. As a member of the student advisory board, Tejas is currently working to form a more well-defined organizational structure by redefining leadership roles. He, along with the rest of the board, hopes to create a more connected and engaging structure that acts even more as a community rather than individually acting roles.
“I now know I want to go into data strategy and drive development – it’s exciting to have clarity in career goals.”
Beyond graduation, Tejas will go on to work in data strategy and analytics in either the technology or finance industry. He hopes to first start off at a large company and then move on to smaller start-ups once he has a better sense of his specific interests, company resources, and industry best practice. Throughout his three co-op and internship experiences, he has continuously asked himself what he likes, what he wants to improve, and what he wants to change in the future. This idea has shifted over the years based on his co-ops, and has helped him to create a more concrete set of goals. “I now know I want to go into data strategy and drive development – it’s exciting to have clarity in career goals.” Wherever he ends up, Tejas will always carry with him an eagerness to learn and a sense of gratitude for the opportunities he has had both within and outside of the Galante Program.
