Northeastern Gave Me the Courage I Needed to Succeed on Co-op

While studying at Northeastern, Karan R. Agrawal, MS’23, information systems, worked at Vantage Risk on a co-op as a data engineer starting. He believes his first-year courses equipped him for data engineering. “Northeastern courses are very industry oriented and focused on practical implementation,” he stated. “My projects here gave me the courage to apply to go on co-op, and my co-op faculty coordinator made the authorizations and permissions process easy.”

Vantage Risk offers global property and casualty specialized re/insurance products. The company specializes in property catastrophe reinsurance in North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia and specialty reinsurance in marine, energy, aviation, crop, workers’ compensation, property per-risk, and mortgage. Agrawal’s main duties while on co-op were to establish a data architecture that provided accurate data to all business users. This profession requires knowledge of Python and SQL (structured query language) and the ability to design apps that solve real-world problems.

Agrawal helped the organization automate document transfer utilizing Python, SQL, Azure Queues, and the event-trigger pub/sub concept to save 200 man-hours per month. He worked to eliminate duplicate customer records from several source systems and designed an OCR + Elasticsearch solution for non-text searchable insurance documents (PDFs, PNGs). Additionally, he integrated unstructured data from insurance rating spreadsheets into Snowflake, while not disturbing the actuarial workflow. His work enabled future data-driven projects that will improve core decision-making at Vantage Risk.

Agrawal plans to work for Vantage Risk as a data engineer after graduation. He believes that data engineering has evolved and stated, “today’s importance may change tomorrow. I always wanted to be first with new tech stacks, processes, etc.”

Related Departments:Multidisciplinary Masters (IT Areas)