Amish Brahmbhatt: from Sears Holdings Corporation to UIC Liautaud

We regularly invite our MBA Ambassadors to share their views on student life at UIC Liautaud. Amish Brahmbhatt is a full-time Liautaud MBA student and President of the MBA Association. Below, Amish shares his reflections on the first year of his Liautaud experience.

As an analyst in the Consumer Electronics department of Sears Holdings, I was responsible for compiling data to support testing and solve business problems. Over time, I started thinking more and more about not just how we compiled data, but about the decisions that were based on the data, and about how those decisions were executed. I’d known all along that I wanted to get my MBA; it was this change in my thinking at Sears that spurred a chain of events that ultimately brought me here to UIC Liautaud.

Why Liautaud? It came down to two factors: the proximity of the campus to the companies I was interested in and the flexibility of the program. I knew that networking would be a big part of getting the work that I wanted, so I focused on the Chicago schools. Among these, I was drawn to the opportunities at Liautaud to experiment and take charge of my own education. My most valuable learning experiences have always been those where there’s a flexibility that allows me to move outside the box and test my own limits. From the moment I arrived on UIC’s campus for an interview, I felt charged with an energy that made me want to test those limits.

Once I started classes, I felt energized all over again by my new classmates. Liautaud students are coming from every imaginable industry, and from all over the world. Their diversity of perspectives, along with the emphasis at Liautaud on international business, makes it an exciting place to study. I’m really going to miss spending time with the amazing people I’ve met here at UIC. However, like I said, I’m focused on networking. The connections I make at Liautaud will stay with me throughout my career.

The faculty, too, have become valuable contacts, an unexpected gain from my time here. They’ve made themselves available throughout my study and my interview process for conversations about the corporate climate that have helped me rehearse my thinking ahead of meetings with employers. The support from faculty and the mutual support among students, both inside the student organizations and in general, has been another big source of inspiration. People here are working hard for each other and for themselves.