Experiential Learning Leads to Business Intelligence Analyst Position at Adobe
The combination of academic and work experience, including two co-ops, has helped Vishnu Rao-Sharma, MS’24, information systems, land a job as a business intelligence analyst at Adobe, his former co-op employer.
After completing successful internships where he honed his skills in data analysis and visualization, Vishnu Rao-Sharma, MS’24, information systems, is set to officially kick off his career as a business intelligence analyst at Adobe. Rao-Sharma is excited to expand his expertise as a cloud practitioner, developing big data systems and machine learning models on platforms like Amazon Web Services.
He started his journey prior to joining Northeastern where he worked on the merchandising team at Wayfair supporting initiatives to enrich catalog data and supplier workflows. While at Northeastern, he worked as an intern focusing on client analytics and data management at Loris, a startup that leverages machine learning to deliver customer service insights. Rao-Sharma initiated the development of a suite of internal applications that allowed client relationship managers (CRMs) to efficiently visualize data and highlight the impact of the Loris platform. His apps eliminated the bottleneck in client data analysis, empowering CRMs to easily demonstrate product value and engage clients more meaningfully. He also ran exploratory topic modeling on new client conversations, a measure that helped to identify potential customer and product concerns before they escalated. His work provided valuable insights to clients and CRMs, ensuring that the team was prepared to triage emerging problems.
Rao-Sharma’s creative analytics journey continued through an internship on Adobe’s Behance team in the summer of 2024. He focused on a key project visualizing the process of hiring freelancers. Using Python and Mode analytics, he visualized the end-to-end hiring funnel, giving Behance’s product team an insightful view of each stage of hiring. This analysis identified key bottlenecks and offered strategic insights for prioritizing feature development, paving the way for a more seamless experience.
Rao-Sharma says his time at Northeastern helped shape his professional outlook. Under the mentorship of Kishore Aradhya, adjunct faculty, Multidisciplinary Graduate Engineering Program, he gained exposure to innovative technologies like generative AI and data engineering, further fueling his interest in the field. His semester-long project in Aradhya’s class allowed him to pitch a data-driven product to industry professionals, giving him a taste of the entrepreneurial side of technology industry.
At Northeastern, Rao-Sharma developed skills that bridged academia and industry, including data modeling, statistical analysis, application design, and engineering with generative AI. Overcoming the challenge of building a tech career in an ever-evolving industry, he attributes much of his success to his mentors, who encouraged him to think creatively and broaden his career perspective.
“Builders and analysts like me want to make beautiful things that work,” Rao-Sharma says. “The key is understanding various viewpoints and needs to create solutions that are both effective and delightful.”