When Shivani Handa was accepted to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to study a Masters in Mechanical Engineering, she was used to being outnumbered. “In my undergraduate degree in India, there were four women to 150 men,” she says. But nothing prepared her for the reaction from her advisor at Carnegie Mellon, who walked up to their first meeting prepared to meet with a man.

“He looked me up and down, and appeared startled,” says Shivani. “He said, ‘But you’re a woman.’ I replied: ‘Yes, why are you so surprised?’” He said he hadn’t seen an Indian girl do her masters in mechanical engineering for many, many years.” And so, she found herself having to explain why she was there.

Crossing continents

Shivani’s path to engineering was carved from an early age. As a little girl, she and her twin sister would beg their father to take them to the factory in India where he worked as a managing director. “I was in complete awe of the entire magnitude of the design and manufacturing process,” she says. “I realized early on that what I like about engineering is that it’s not a conceptual field where you have to imagine — you can actually see what’s happening.”

At 15, she traveled to the US alone to embark on a high school exchange program through Rotary. Her host father was also an engineer, and when she told him she was having trouble deciding between engineering or law, he immediately drove her and another exchange student to a brewery he was building on the east coast.

“The other student was bored out of her mind looking at designs and manufacturing,” recalls Shivani. “But I thought it was a super interesting experience to see something evolve from start to finish. Of course, I was too young to taste the beer but to watch something being created was just so exciting. When I came back to India the decision was simple: I pursued engineering.”

Shivani did her undergraduate degree in India at the Maharashtra Institute of Technology and later returned to the US to get her Masters in Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon. Shivani then landed a job in Las Vegas designing cranes, but still felt there was a piece of the puzzle missing.

“Somewhere along the way, I realized that I didn’t have enough business knowledge to understand what makes a product successful,” she says, “so I decided to go to business school, got an MBA in finance and strategy, and joined the Siemens Graduate Program right after that.”

She says the program was a great opportunity for her: “With the three rotations, I got the chance to delve deeper into various functions and broaden my knowledge base, while using my background in engineering and business.”

Choosing to call India home

To say that her six years at Siemens have been varied is an understatement; she has now moved to her fifth city. She has worked as a financial controller in Erlangen in Germany and Gurgaon in India. She’s worked in a factory on the product side, as well as project controlling at substations. Essentially, moving from a small piece of the pie to the larger picture. She has consulted on factories in Dresden and Nuremberg.

While living in Bangalore, Shivani was a Senior Manager working on the Smart Cities Mission and AMRUT. These are some of the largest schemes ever undertaken by any government, not just in terms of funds but also outreach. The Smart Cities mission covers 100 cities while the Amrut mission covers 500 smaller towns.

“Power is one of the building blocks of city infrastructure, so I felt the transition to my current role was made easier because of my Siemens Graduate Program background,” says Shivani.

“A lot of people ask why I moved back to India after working in the US and Germany. The answer is simple: there’s just so much to be done here. If everyone who is smart or intelligent moves out of the country, then India will never improve. I really think change begins from within.”