Interview with Ajay Natarajan, UCONN/Chicago Booth School of Business

Interviewer: All right, very cool, so hopefully we can squeeze this conversation in because I know we have a ton to cover now that you’re officially in grad school. But hi, always excited to welcome students back that I have a previous relationship with and you’re our first graduate student and I’ll let you do a quick intro too. But you’re joining us from UCONN which is a great school and now you are at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. We met for the first time at a career fair of all places and today we get to learn more about your journey and hear about how it all.

First question: just to open, can you give us a quick introduction and how you found your way to University of Connecticut?

Ajay: Sure, so my name is Ajay Natarajan, I’m currently a grad student at the Chicago Booth School of Business, but I graduated last year from the University of Connecticut (UCONN) with degrees in Economics and Statistics. I’m from Ridgefield, CT but I definitely did a lot of stuff that I enjoyed while at UCONN and I’m looking forward to being part of this conversation.

Interviewer: Yeah it’s awesome to have you here, so you mentioned growing up in Connecticut, and that was born and raised or did you move around at all growing up?

Ajay: I was born and raised in Connecticut – I lived in Farmington i think for like the first year and a half of my life and then moved to Ridgefield and I’ve been there ever since, yeah, yeah.

Interviewer: So, not too far from UCONN, and I’m familiar, but just for people that are going to read this later, was UCONN really high on your list? Did you always know you wanted to go there? Did you look all over the country?

Ajay: UCONN was definitely really high on my list. I would say if I didn’t get in, I applied to a couple of Ivy League schools, just as like reaches – I applied to Dartmouth and Penn. I figured if I got in there, I’d probably go there. If not, UCONN was super high on my list, since it has great academics, great sports, and I was super familiar with it. I wasn’t really looking too far outside of the Northeast Mid-Atlantic area. But I was pretty happy to stay at a good school close to home.

Interviewer: And location is usually a really big piece that contributes to where students are looking.

Was there a reason you wanted to stay in the New England or Northeast area?

Interviewer: Yeah, like I hadn’t really spent a ton of time too far from home at that point, and I figured like if I wasn’t adapting well or there were things that I needed to get from home it would be nice to not be a plane ride away and to just be able to drive. So, yeah, now I’m in Chicago, that’s completely different, but I think at this point in my life, I’m a bit better situated myself to live farther away than I was at the time.

Interviewer: That makes total sense, and I can’t wait to hear about all you’ve been up to inn Chicago later in our conversation. So, you experienced a lot of growth in undergrad, and to tackle some of those examples, the three key areas that I like to touch on are: community, curriculum,  and then professional opportunities and resources.

So, on the community side of things, logistically it made sense from where your home was and accessing that as you needed, but was it really easy to branch out at UCONN? UCONN’s a big school – who did you build for a community when you got there your first year?

Ajay: I think it took me a little bit to find community initially. Part of the challenge for me with UCONN was I started in August of 2020, so right in the middle of COVID. UCONN and Connecticut in general were very strict in terms of COVID rules so I think I had one class in person that semester. The rest were completely online. Most clubs were shut down or on Zoom. So it definitely made it a bit more of a challenge than a traditional freshman coming in. So I would say a lot of the people that I met in my first year ended up being people in my dorm in the honors program at UCONN since we had kind of our own housing in our own community. I also tried to branch out a little bit too. I found that a lot of the clubs I joined my freshman year didn’t really stick with me, but I met a couple of cool people from there and especially some cool people from my classes. So there were a few people that I ended up interacting with for the rest of my four years. I got familiar with them freshman year and we kind of all grew together.

Interviewer: Oh, that’s great. Yeah. I always forget timing-wise who had the COVID happen in high school or going into college. So again, everyone had to kind of deal with that in a different way. And it sounded like there were still some ways to engage with the community like you were just talking about.

Which clubs specifically did you try out where you met some of your closer friends?

Ajay: Yeah. So I wouldn’t say freshman year, I really found many of those. Like I tried joining a few things that I was pretty interested in. I joined the outing club. I ended up staying with the outing club, met a couple of great people through that later on, but not really anybody in freshman year. Photography club, I didn’t meet many people. But then I ended up getting more involved in other stuff later. So my sophomore year, I joined a business frat. I didn’t end up sticking with that one for too long, but I met a bunch of great people through there that I’m still friends with. And then later on, I also ended up joining the student alumni association at UCONN. Basically they’re responsible for putting on a bunch of campus traditions and doing a bunch of volunteering. So I found that super valuable, made some of my closest friends there. And also I joined a couple of more professional academic clubs. We had Hillside Ventures, which is like a student-run venture capital fund, which I thought was a fantastic opportunity. It kind of operated as like a class and club. It was a ton of work, but I met a bunch of great people through there. And I also participated in the college Federal Reserve challenge, which was similar in that it was a lot of work, kind of academic and professional, but those were the kind of things that aligned with my interest areas being econ and stats with an interest in finance.

Interviewer: Oh, that’s cool.

You just mentioned so many clubs, how many clubs were you involved in? How many did you try?

Ajay: I tried more than I ended up sticking with, but I would say the main ones that I was sticking with by the end of my time in academics or at UCONN were Hillside and the student alumni association.

Interviewer: So it’s possible to do multiple, which is nice. And you can definitely manage multiple with your schedule it sounds like.

Ajay: I know people who were involved in more things than me, but by my junior, senior year, it was definitely a time commitment. So you’d have to be really good at managing your time to balance a ton of those commitments.

Interviewer: Cause there are events and there are different kinds of meetings all the time. Last question on the clubs.

What was the biggest club in terms of like population of students that you were a part of?

Ajay: In terms of population of students, probably outing club. But that was kind of inherently popular. Like you pay a relatively small amount of dues, I think like 30 bucks or something and the school partially funds it and they set up a bunch of really cool trips. Me, I’m really outdoorsy. I was an Eagle Scout in high school. So I’ve always really liked to hike and camp and they put on a bunch of great events, great projects. And yeah, like they run a ski trip every year. So I went up to Smuggler’s Notch a couple of times, a couple of fun hiking trips up in the White Mountains in New Hampshire. Always fun.

Interviewer: Oh, that’s cool. Well, I obviously know Smuggler’s as you know, the Vermont shout out. That’s great. So yeah, you’re kind of bringing these interests to your time in undergrad, and you were an Eagle Scout. I didn’t know that. That’s an incredible accomplishment too. So to be able to kind of continue that in a way in college, I think that’s a great thing to point out as well. So a couple more things just on the community.

Are you meeting a lot of administrators through these things that you’re committing to and events you’re doing? Or is it primarily student-focused? I know students are primarily involved, but is there a lot of collaboration with faculty and staff as well?

Ajay: I would say so. Yeah. Like, especially if you consider faculty, especially some of mine more like something like the outing clubs, definitely much more student-run. But in terms of the ones that are more academic and professional, those definitely have a bit more of an outsized influence from faculty. We had a couple of people in the business school running Hillside Ventures, one of whom was a real estate entrepreneur, really accomplished guy. And I learned a lot from him. I mean, both of these were run through the entrepreneurship department at UCONN. So it was cool being part of that. But I learned a lot from the faculty as well. And there was a lot of collaboration there. With the College Federal Reserve Challenge as well. We had a couple of economics professors as well. And I learned a lot from them. And it was fundamentally student run, but you had them to lean back on for insight. So that’s great.

Interviewer: Yeah, I think I think it’s a good testament to just a lot of these top institutions, their faculty, especially, and definitely staff. They want to support students in different ways. They want to learn with them and help them develop professionally. And that’s kind of the point around all the things you’ve been involved in. So we talked about your major, we talked about some of the clubs.

And last question, just around UCONN, like going to school there, how are the people and how’s the area?

Ajay: There’s fun things to do around the campus. Yeah. I mean, okay, I guess in terms of the area, UCONN is a little bit isolated. It’s a little bit in the middle of nowhere. I think the closest city is about half an hour away, and that’s Hartford. And I wouldn’t say Hartford has a ton to do. That said, UCONN’s its own giant campus; you’ve got a ton to do there. It’s a huge place, there’s a ton of people. And I kind of found, like, that was something I was looking for going in the school I went to. But I’m glad I was part of the Honors College, because it was kind of its own little community within the big school. Part of a big school atmosphere, too, is that it may not be like as close knit together. And you might have to search for your own opportunities a little bit. So I definitely had to do that. But I feel like there were definitely a lot of small communities within the bigger school environment. And definitely a lot of overlap between those two.

Interviewer: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And we can almost call it the city of UCONN. So like you’re saying, maybe you have to search a bit. But when you do search, you can find those smaller groups, and then branch out from there if you want to, which I think is a great balance. The next thing I am interested in is hearing about your transition to grad school and how that led to professional opportunities or if it happened because of limited professional opportunities.

Did you go right into grad school from UCONN? What was the process like, considering different career paths or going to grad school right away? And how’d you make that decision?

Ajay: Sure. So honestly, like going through college, I wasn’t as sure about what I wanted to do as a career. UCONN and Stats, I think in general, are both really broad. And that was kind of the intention that I made when coming in, because I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I was interested in finance; I was interested in politics; I’m pretty interested in law. So I didn’t know exactly which way I wanted to orient it. And by the time I figured out that I was really interested in finance, it was probably a little bit late for like, a traditional undergrad finance recruiting cycle. I did intern after my sophomore and junior year. After my sophomore year, I interned abroad in London at an economic consulting company. And I was really interested in finance and I interned in my junior year at New York Life Insurance, but didn’t particularly enjoy my time at New York Life. Anyway, I figured I kind of wanted to pivot away from insurance; I was hoping to pivot to like, more strictly finance. And that was what led me to explore finance grad programs, because I’ve heard of master’s in finance programs popping up. I didn’t know Chicago Booth had one. But I’ve had a few members of my extended family go to Chicago Booth, and absolutely love it. And when I saw this was an opportunity, I took that as probably late in my first semester of senior year. And from there, I kind of just tried to explore that option, speak to people there, learn about what the program would entail. And then I ended up applying in my second semester of senior year and got in. And I went to my grad program straight from undergrad pretty much.

Interviewer: That’s so great. And I think it depends on the student and what they’re looking for at a certain time. And some parts of the search can be really certain where you get some direction from an internship or a class you’ve taken. And it can be exactly what you’re looking for. But it can be the opposite. But you did mention family and where they went to school previously as well. So, you had a connection in one way or another.

Did you have a lot of family conversations when you were choosing UCONN and then where you ended up at Booth? And was that helpful?

Ajay: Yeah, I would definitely say family conversations, my mom in particular, really liked UCONN. Being that it was in-state, had really good academics, had a great economics program, which I was pretty set on at the time. She also liked that it was a big school with a lot of room to explore, so, a lot of the same reasons as me. And I really liked it at the time. Nobody else in my family had gone to UCONN, but I was pretty excited to be the first one to go and I really enjoyed it.

Interviewer: Well you’ve gone from undergrad to grad school in the short time I’ve known you, so we will cover both – are there a lot of resources for professional development opportunities at UCONN and Booth?

Ajay: Yeah I would definitely say so. The career centers, they’re really good. I knew a couple people there, one of my friends actually interned there at UCONN, so she helped review my resume several times. But they had a lot of opportunities. And during undergrad, I probably could have been a little bit more proactive on that front, so I definitely recommend that people do that. But there’s plenty other careers, but if you’re interested in business careers getting into a lot of clubs is important. Like say you’re interested in investment banking, there’s an investment banking society and I know that they bring in a ton of people to collaborate. Even for Hillside they bring in people from Connecticut Innovations which is like Connecticut State Venture Capital Fund. So there’s a lot of opportunities to kind of expand your network and get professional opportunities from outside of strictly like the career center as well. So, I definitely think that making the most of your opportunities can help you professionally as well.

Interviewer: Yeah, yeah. So clubs are essential. But you should do what you can to combine it with formal events like career fairs and career center resources.

Is there a big difference between your undergrad experience and now your grad experience either in general or from a career standpoint?

Ajay: I would say my grad experience is much different as a grad-level program. I would say the topics talked about are a little bit more advanced, they bring in more guest speakers. Also, being at Booth they have a really, really good alumni network, so some of the people that I’ve met here have been really cool and have so much to offer. I’ve met a couple people from I think, I met the CEO of Hyatt in the fall, actually it was really cool. But there’s really a great network that you can make, but I would also say this program that I’m in now is in its infancy too, so it doesn’t necessarily have the alumni connections that something like the MBA has, but I would say there’s definitely good opportunities in both places.

Interviewer: Yeah that makes sense, so more specifically, from a UCONN standpoint it was a bit easier to jump from one small community to the next within a larger campus community but in grad school it can be different.

Is it possible to access all of the different parts of the Booth community?

Ajay: It’s been something that’s been explored during the first year here, a couple of moments of friction through it, but there are some silos of access, like classes are definitely not one of them, they are very mixed, and I think that’s a great opportunity as well to kind of connect with other students. I’m just out of undergrad, and it’s really cool to see how, I’m in a finance class right now. I’ve got my final for that tomorrow, actually. But yeah, there are a lot of people in that class that have come from fintech backgrounds all over the worldand it’s really cool to see how their career has gone up to this point and how their interests have developed and what made them want to go to grad school. So I think it’s a great learning opportunity on both sides, in terms of like clubs and social events that end up being a little bit more siloed especially if we’re talking more like professional events as well. And considering the MBA recruiting timeline is different than the stuff that I’m recruiting for, which is more entry-level, the events are tailored through different offices and departments.

Interviewer: Which I think is so important because a lot of times networking is not at a high-top table at an event; It’s grabbing coffee or going for a run with somebody and talking about things. So, I think that’s really good insight. You just keep immersing yourself in the community and you’ve done that at UCONN and now Booth. And you’ll probably end up doing some other credential at some point in the future, knowing you. But that’s a question for another day. So that’s great.

Are there any skills or systems you’ve used that have been most beneficial to you, either as an undergrad or just as a student in general, to be successful?

Ajay: I guess by ‘skills’, you mean like more hard skills or something?

Interviewer: Yeah, any combination. Could be like presentation skills, teamwork, hard skills. I mean, you have all of those. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to ask you to join me for this.

Ajay: Yeah. I mean, I would say that communication’s a really important soft skill. But I think I took a little bit of time to develop that a little bit better. But communication is important. And time management, I would say, are a couple of the really important soft skills. Also being able to work in a team and not feel overshadowed, like being willing to contribute and being willing to hear other people kind of work overall well in a team. I guess in terms of hard skills, I’m coming at this from like an econ stats background. So I think that there’s a lot of really good hard skills to learn. Microsoft and Excel in general. And the Microsoft Office suite. Super generally useful. There’s a ton of stuff you can do with it. I also think learning Python is really nice. Like, you can end up automating a whole bunch of stuff through it. I’ve also learned R and Stata, and a couple of other statistical programming languages for that. And I’ve used them in a bunch of other contexts. I did an independent project with the UCONN football team during undergrad. That ended up requiring a lot of R, but definitely really rewarding as well.

Interviewer: Some of those are just kind of generally accepted across a lot of undergrad education that there’s skills that you’ll use. And even if it’s not the specific type of code or programming software, it’s going to be something that is a skill that kind of builds over time and you apply it to different programs and jobs you have in the future. Just a couple more questions for you. The last one is going to be your best advice for students in general to make the most of undergrad or grad school. But right before that, I was just curious…

…what your goal is coming out of your program or maybe even five years out. What are you hoping to do professionally?

Ajay: Yeah, so I’m interning at IBM this summer and I’m hoping to continue with that because I think that’s an area of my interest. I’m pretty interested in corporate finance. I honestly am not as sure for my five-year outlook. I’m debating the merits or not of taking an MBA after this program. And I think it’ll more so depend on where I’m at in five years. But I’m hoping to stay within the finance world. But I think my answer right now would probably be different compared to my answer in a year. I think it would be helpful to have a bit more work experience before answering that.

Interviewer: I think that’s a smart answer because tomorrow you could have a new opportunity to explore, which is the beauty of all of this.

All right. Last question, I promise. It’s been amazing so far. So many good insights. But one bit of advice in terms of making the most of undergrad or your time as a student in undergrad. Or grad school. And just kind of like an end note to leave students with that read our interview.

Ajay: Yeah. Definitely. I would say this took me a while to develop. But not being afraid to put yourself out there. So I think being willing to search for a bunch of opportunities freshman year. Like it can help, especially doing it freshman year early on. Being willing to put yourself out there, both socially and in terms of joining groups. And really, the more you do then like this is before a lot of groups start to stick. You can make some really good friends through that. And you can join a bunch of programs that you might be part of for the rest of your time in college. I also wish, in hindsight, that I hadn’t gone as hard academically as I ended up doing freshman year. So, I would say maybe kind of stick with gen eds and some of the prereq classes early on. What I ended up doing was I ended up going into a bunch of core classes freshman year during COVID. It was a little bit overwhelming. And I didn’t have as much time to focus on stuff outside of academics. And I think I missed out a little bit too. So, I would say definitely try to put yourself out there. Look at a bunch of opportunities available to you. Try to embrace them all. And I think learning time management as well is really big. In managing academics. Keeping grades up. And doing that at the same time. Yeah.

Interviewer: So, you went full pressure first year. Just core classes and you needed that high GPA. And that sounds tough especially with COVID.

Ajay: Yeah. I came in with like a bunch of AP credits and UCONN like dual enrollment credits from high school. So, I figured like okay. I was initially thinking of maybe graduating in three years. Ended up realizing that that probably wouldn’t be the best idea. And I was enjoying my time in college too much to do that anyway. So, that was kind of my thoughts initially. But I realized while I was doing it: okay, maybe not the best idea. Taking 18 credits in my second semester also not the best.

Interviewer: That’s crazy! But again, to your point, joining groups, meeting people; that helps you get through a pandemic. Which, that says a lot on its own. And UCONN fostered that as well, which I think is amazing. So, that’s perfect. Well Ajay, from UCONN to Booth, it’s been so great hearing about your experiences. Thank you very much for your time. I can’t wait to share this on the website!