Alumni Spotlight 10 21 26

Startup or Big Tech: Which One's For You? A Path Through Startups, Big Tech, and Everything In Between Event. Startup or big tech? It's the question everyone in data science is trying to answer - and Priyanshi has lived both sides of it. She'll trace her path from pure research, to running Al and product at a startup, to landing somewhere in between today. What changes about the work. What you gain and give up. Why the technical-versus-business tradeoff turned out to be less of a fork in the road than she expected. Plus: why personal branding matters more than ever right now. Come with questions about your own next move. Presenter Bio: Priyanshi Shah earned her MS in Data Science at HSDSC in 2024. She is a Senior Applied Scientist at Microsoft, where she works on Al agents, LLMs, and evaluation frameworks for production systems. Previously Priyanshi was Head of Al and a founding engineer at a health Al startup, building multi-agent systems on wearable data and leading a 15+ person engineering team. She built Vakyansh, the first ever open-source speech recognition system across 23 Indic languages. Her research has appeared at venues including ICLR. She's a scientist who enjoys the business side as much as the science. For fun, she shares the latest in Al with a growing community on social media, and is always up for networking at Al events.