Building a Career at the Intersection of Technology and Purpose
Meghna Havalgi, MS’25, information systems, decided to pursue a master’s degree due to her passion for wanting to empower communities through new and innovative technological advancements. Through her co-op, classroom experiences and projects she has used her technical skills to achieve her career goals.
Meghna Havalgi is a current graduate student in the MS in information systems program at Northeastern University. Before joining Northeastern, she stood at the intersection of technology and finance. She earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration and computer science from Osmania University in India, followed by a postgraduate diploma in software engineering for data science from IIIT Hyderabad. Professionally, she began her career in the structured, well-defined world of finance at Deloitte Consulting. But deep down, she knew she wanted more—more creativity, more innovation, and more room to explore the unknown.
Havalgi decided to pursue a master’s degree at Northeastern because she wanted to build a meaningful career at the cutting edge of technology—one that wasn’t just about writing code, but about using data to tell powerful stories and solve real-world problems. Northeastern stood out to her not only for its academic rigor, but also for its strong emphasis on experiential learning. She was especially drawn to the co-op program, which felt like a bridge between theory and impact—a chance to immerse herself in the industry, test her skills in real-world settings, and learn by doing. As someone transitioning into the tech field, hands-on experience is invaluable. Havalgi wasn’t looking for just a degree; she was seeking a transformation. She shares that the information systems program was the perfect blend of business and technology—an ideal match for her background in finance and passion for tech. She was particularly excited by the range of data science and generative AI courses, which signaled that the program wasn’t just keeping up with the times but was future-focused and forward-thinking.
In the Classroom
Havalgi credits Teaching Professor Dino Konstantopoulos’s “Neural Modeling” course as a lasting highlight of her time at Northeastern. She deeply admires his ability to make even the most complex ideas feel intuitive and engaging. His notes were invaluable, and the way he fostered curiosity made the course feel less like a traditional class and more like a collaborative exploration. Havalgi looks up to him not only as a teacher but as a role model—someone who embodies the clarity, energy, and generosity she hopes to carry into her own career.
COE Distinguished Professor Auroop Ganguly’s Work immediately stood out to Havalgi—particularly his research at the intersection of climate science and AI. His lab’s focus on using data-driven approaches to understand climate extremes and infrastructure resilience deeply resonated with her passion for applying AI to sustainability. What she finds especially inspiring is how his research blends machine learning with deep domain knowledge to tackle real-world challenges, from environmental risk to energy systems and policymaking. The mission of AI4CaS—using AI to power planet-saving innovations—perfectly aligns with the kind of impact she hopes to make in her career. For Havalgi, his work exemplifies how Northeastern isn’t just preparing students for the future of technology but actively shaping a more sustainable and resilient world.
Co-op Experience
Havalgi secured a co-op at Parametric Portfolio Associates—Morgan Stanley’s asset management division as a quantitative research associate. This role gave her the opportunity to work on real-world problems that directly support investment research. She describes the co-op program as a cornerstone of her Northeastern journey. During her co-op at Morgan Stanley, she led the design and implementation of a Python-based back-testing framework for fixed-income strategies—a capstone-style project with long-term research impact. The framework enabled the research team to evaluate historical strategy performance and refine investment signals more efficiently. Beyond that, she contributed to ESG reconciliation processes and developed interactive Tableau dashboards to support trader analytics. One of her dashboards was even recognized internally for its role in streamlining daily operations.
What made the experience truly unforgettable, she shares, was the people who were there. Havalgi had the chance to collaborate with brilliant minds who consistently pushed the boundaries of what data can achieve. She was especially fortunate to have a mentor whose humility, guidance, and depth of knowledge left a lasting impression. “He is someone I will always look up to,” she reflects, “and his mentorship shaped not just how I work, but how I lead and collaborate.”
This co-op not only reinforced her technical foundation—it gave her clarity about the environments she thrives in and the kind of data professional she aspires to become.
Group projects
Havalgi had the opportunity to work on several exciting and technically challenging projects that allowed her to apply classroom knowledge to real-world problems.
Course Recommendation System (Presented at RISE 2024):
Together with a teammate, Havalgi designed and implemented a hybrid recommendation engine that combined content-based filtering—leveraging course descriptions, prerequisites, and keywords—with collaborative filtering based on peer enrollment patterns and course ratings. They used TF-IDF vectorization to assess content similarity and a user-item interaction matrix with cosine similarity for collaborative filtering. The goal was to help students make more informed course selections by incorporating both individual interests and community trends.
Presenting this work at RISE 2024 was a highlight of her academic experience. Among more than 400 research projects, Havalgi engaged in thought-provoking discussions and received valuable feedback that inspired further exploration into personalization and interpretability.
Text-to-Image Generation with Stable Diffusion:
For her NLP final project, Havalgi fine-tuned the U-Net component of the Stable Diffusion pipeline using the Flickr8k image-caption dataset. The objective was to generate high-quality images from natural language prompts by training only the diffusion layers with LoRA (Low-Rank Adaptation), while keeping the CLIP text encoder and VAE components frozen.
Along with her team, she also developed a full-stack web application with chatbot integration, enabling users to generate images through conversational prompts. The project emphasized not just model performance, but also usability, human-AI interaction, and real-time image generation through a responsive and intuitive interface.
Northeastern has been nothing short of transformative for Havalgi. It’s where she turned the daunting leap from finance into the exhilarating world of data and AI—a leap that became a reality she’s proud of every day. The combination of rigorous coursework, hands-on projects, and real-world co-op experience not only sharpened her technical skills but also helped her discover her confidence and voice as a data scientist.
Looking ahead, Havalgi aspires to build a career at the intersection of technology and purpose—where data and AI are not just tools, but catalysts for positive change. She is particularly excited by the fields of climate tech and sustainable finance, believing these spaces hold the power to drive innovation that benefits both people and the planet. In the long run, she hopes to lead projects that empower communities, foster smarter decision-making, and promote the responsible use of AI.
As an international student, Havalgi says that finding a sense of belonging meant everything—and Northeastern provided that. From late-night work sessions and unexpected breakthroughs to the friendships she’s built along the way, some of the most rewarding parts of her journey have been human ones.
Reflecting on it all, she hopes others take away one key message from her story: “It’s those bold leaps—like moving from finance to tech or embracing new challenges—that lead to growth and open doors to unexpected opportunities.”