Yale School of Management

Love Bajpai ’17

MBA For ExecutivesCurrent Position: Senior Director, Analytics and Reporting, Travelers

When I started the EMBA program, I wanted to learn more about finance and accounting and how the markets work. My expectation was to gain certain skill sets that would help me better understand the industry, and then apply them in my job. But over the last 18 months, I’ve gained so much more. This program has helped me understand myself. The most beneficial classes were the leadership classes. My strengths have always been understanding how to build teams and be assertive and push things through. But at Yale SOM, I’ve learned to be more collaborative and focus on how my team is functioning. I’m connecting with more people and expanding my network, as opposed to being a one-man army. It’s really changed how I relate to my colleagues and how we perform as a team.

Over the last few years, we’ve seen a tremendous amount of money going into the healthcare sector, and there are a lot of complaints about how we’re not efficient. I’ve been in healthcare for a long time, and I realized that in order to understand what’s going on, I needed to first understand all aspects of the business. I thought the best way was to first have an appreciation of the different perspectives that drive any business: the CFO perspective, the customer’s perspective, the competitor perspective. SOM’s curriculum takes that exact approach. It’s structured through the different perspectives and how they intersect. Now when I read about an insurance company wanting to back out of the ACA, I understand why.

When I used to watch the business news, not a lot of it made sense to me. I have an engineering background. I’m an IT process kind of guy. After all the core classes at SOM, everything started making sense. You understand, for instance, why demonetization in India is going to impact the GDP, or how oil prices are affecting the global market. I just couldn’t connect those dots before. I had no grounding in them. It’s really opened up a new world for me.

Interviewed on December 22, 2016

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