Building Skill and Confidence

Northeastern’s co-op experience was not just one of the best memories of Deekshitha Venkateshaiah’s, MS Information Systems 2019, life. It made her realize that Ernst & Young is the company that she wants to be a part of in the future as well.

“That is the kind of flexibility and people I would want to work with,” she said.

Deekshitha has always thought that having a technical background is really important. She got her bachelor’s in Electronics and Communications Engineering at Ramaiah Institute of Technology, back in Bangalore, India. Today, Deekshitha is an Information System graduate student here, at Northeastern. She came all the way to the United States to use and improve the knowledge that she gained studying and working at home.

She started her program at Northeastern in fall 2017, and shortly after, she applied for the Risk Advisory Practice intern position at Ernst & Young. Deekshitha has worked for the company back at home as an analyst, but she had no idea that working for the same organization in San Jose, California, would be just as an amazing experience.

When Deekshitha moved to California and started her co-op, she was worried that the environment would not be similar to what she was used to while working for Ernst & Young in India. Even though the working culture turned out to be very different, the principles and pillars of the company stayed the same.

“The culture is so amazing,” she said. “You would not expect an intern to meet with the Partner and for her to say ‘I am so proud of you.’”

Nevertheless, Deekshitha gained a lot of new experience as well. With only one semester at Northeastern, she could feel how much her performance changed. She could tell how much she has grown from the time she worked for the same company in India. Before taking courses in Northeastern, Deekshitha had no knowledge in Java and database design. She recalls working with a team on their client, when she saved a lot of time by applying the knowledge she learned in the Application Engineering Development course, which actually made her dive into coding.

“I was able to read the code and understand what exactly it means,” she said. “I was able to explain it to my team.”

Deekshitha keeps broadening her areas of interest by taking various online courses on Business Analysis, Machine Learning and AI. She is graduating from Northeastern in May 2019 and really hopes to keep working for Ernst & Young in California. “Northeastern has helped me make a big step towards my dream,” she said.

Related Departments:Multidisciplinary Masters (IT Areas)