Nitish Yadav

Nitish Yadav is no stranger to the professional world. Hailing from Goa, India, he pursued a professional career as a consultant for nearly eight years before deciding to attend Olin.

Yadav says this decision was “born out of the desire to push myself out of my comfort zone, discover new skills, talents and experiences.”

Olin was the perfect match

The opportunity for global experiences in education is one many students value. Yadav jumped at the opportunity to attend Olin not only because of its focus on an international approach to business education, but because of how deeply Olin embraced it.

“The revamped global immersion program at Olin for the class of 2021 appealed to me because of the emphasis on learning by doing and taking the learning process across continents and cultures,” he said.

“I had the opportunity to collaborate with a local winery in Barcelona and prepare the go-to-market strategy for launching doughnuts in China,” he said. Yadav explained that “the values-based, data-driven global thought process developed in the MBA program was needed from my business school experience.”

Classmates, partners, friends, companions

Part of the core experience of the global immersion—Olin’s three-continent trip at the start of the MBA program—is developing strong relationships with your classmates. By traveling, learning and growing as a group, Yadav felt his classmates become essential to his learning experience.

“At Olin, the opportunity to live, learn and engage in conversations with a cohort composed of diverse nationalities and backgrounds is vital to me,” he said. “My classmates have been an undeniably strong influence on my understanding of global businesses and challenges.”

He looked forward to a South Africa trip with peers for a crash course on the business landscape in Africa.

On being Values Based, Data Driven™

“Business is often misconceived as being driven by the bottom line. This myth has been shattered during my MBA program,” he said. “As I’ve spent time in the classroom and seen how ‘business’ itself is thought of at Olin, being values-based stood out as an inalienable metric.”

Yadav said he appreciates Olin’s outlook on a world that needs business leaders guided by their inner moral compass who promote an organizational culture of doing well and doing good.

“At Olin, we are informed by the numbers,” he said, “but guided by our values.”

Completing the picture

Before coming to Olin and Washington University, Yadav focused his education on engineering. However, he feels that now, with the benefit of even one year of business school education under his belt, his world has opened up.

“Before business school, my engineering education guided me with facts and numbers and trained me to be hypothesis-driven,” he said. “Olin has pleasantly surprised me with how much there is to know about businesses in the globalized world—how numbers by themselves paint an incomplete picture.”