Capital One

Associate Product Manager

McLean, VA

🥳🥳 Current Update:

Capital One is an amazing company. I had my reservations of how they would handle onboarding during a pandemic, but they killed it. Had a great first week and ended up on an awesome space called the Data Ethics and Privacy Office (DEPO). They handle a multitude of things, the most important one being the CCPA portal. CCPA is basically a California law that states that if a company wants to do business in California, they need to develop a way for users to request or delete any data that the company has on them. Some data is obviously subject to exclusion.

Super cool product. Love the team, my manager, the tech team, and program lead. Love all the other Product Managers that joined with me. We're the PDP class of 2020, and I'm really looking forward to meeting them after we all get vaccinated. Because you know. ❌Covid❌.

🥳🥳 The Backstory:

After my last internship at Barclays, I got a Full-time return offer. A great offer at that. 6 figures. Benefits. 3 weeks PTO. You get the point. They gave me 2 weeks to decide. ...The primary concern I had in mind was rejecting the offer and not landing a Product Manager role. Being jobless as a new grad would suck. The one thing that kept poping up in my mind was my insecurity of always taking the safe/secure path. I hated that I had a goal of becoming a Product Manager but I truly didn't believe I would be one because of how selective the role was. However, during those first few days of making a decision, I kept running into videos of some of my ideals speaking about the best advice they would give 20 year olds like myself. The most re-occuring theme in their advices was to be bold.

So bold I was.

I pulled off the safety net beneath me. Took a leap of faith and I rejected the offer with a week left.

Thus, commenced 6 months of sleepess nights, depression, self doubt, and rejection. I applied to around 300 places. More than 150 of them didn't even respond. Got about 60 rejections. BUT. BUTTTTTTTT. BUT. January 8th, 2020. I got a first round interview for the APM Program at Capital One. Feburary 11th. 2:30 pm. I was working with my capstone group when I got a call telling me I landed the role. Immediately drove home in tears and told my parents. It was definitely top 3 happiest days of my life. However, It would be a sin if I didn't mention that I would have NEVER been able to do it without the help of my closest friends Sagar Shah and Narayan Agrawal. For that, I will forever be in their debt.

What's Next?: *queue pokemon theme song* 🎶I wanna be......the very best🎶 LOL read more

Barclays/Johnson &Johnson

Various Roles

Whippany/Skillman, NJ

🥳🥳 Barclays:

Have a lot of love for this place because of the friends I met here. BUT. I hated it and I will always be grateful to Barcalys for showing me something I didn't like. Before Barclays, I was hesistant on whether I like software engineering or not, but this experience solidified that I didn't want to be a software engineer. Again, nothing against the compnay. The company was great. There are some very intelligent people who work there. It was more the posistion that turned me off....

A lot of people find it difficult to determine if they're passionate about a particular job or not. If that's you, reach out to me and I'll let you know what worked me. It's a long winded answer so I don't want to put it up here.

🥳🥳 JnJ:

This was a 6 month long internship from August 2018 - December 2018 while I took 16 credits in school. The most I learned from these 6 months was just how much work you can get done in a day. I worked 40 hours while taking insane 300 level computer engineering classes.🤮 Ended that semester with a 3.7 though, which goes to show you that you can do so much work in 24 hours if your time management skills are on par.

However, I would never recommend anyone do this.😂 I truly felt myself burning out and that kind of work is just not sustainable.

The role itself was a Business Anayst/Software Engineer role. The role didn't teach me much because it was super unstructured. The culture too was very slow. I thought it was a great place to be in the long run but I definitely wanted to be in a more fast paced environment in the short run. This was my first coorperate experience, so I had to learn a lot of the first steps of coorperate lingo, manager - managee relationship, small talk, etc.... It's acutally something that gets overlooked but coorperate culture definitely takes away from productive initally because there is a lot to learn. read more

Rutgers University

B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering

New Brunswick, NJ

Im gonna be honest. Intially, I hated the idea of going to Rutgers.😅 Most of it was because of the stigma of going to Rutgers from my home town. Stupid way to infuence my mindset.....I know. But I didn't know better. Thankfully, 4 years later, I came to realize that it was one of the greatest things to ever happen to me. It really opened up my view of the world and showed me what was possible with hardwork and determination. I made the greatest friends in the whole fucking world. Met so many interesting people, been part of movie-like experiences, and gave me oppurtunities that I could never imagine I would have. I can never re-pay everything that it has given me but I understand that, this is the beauty of college.

High School North

West Windsor Plainsboro

My High School experience was interesting. North was ranked as one of the best public high schools in the nation and thus you could imagine how competetive the school was. There were definitely some dark days filled with inadequetecy because you tend to fall into the trap of comparing yourself to the top 1% of students in the nation. Only in college did I realize that creating your own path was the name of the game. I was obssesed with grades, AP classes, GPA, SAT, and extracircular clubs. It was very unhealthy looking back on it. 😅

However, I ended up pushing myself to the absoulte limit every year and thus all the coursework in college was simple in comparison. I can also confidently say that I met the smartest people I ever will meet in my life already, which is crazy in itself. I also made life long friends and memories that I will always cherish.