Did you work while you were in school?

My parents really wanted us to focus on school. They didn’t even make us do chores. But after my sophomore year, I started doing telemarketing research. Being a small, petite person, I’ve really learned to communicate with people over the phone. I worked at Bain & Company, and we’d have to call a lot of random people. People used to call me the Queen of Cold Calling, because I was so good on getting people to engage and spend an hour talking to me.

What made you decide to go to M.I.T.?

I loved math and science. I was the first woman in my school to win the physics award. When my teacher told me that, I was like, “Wow.” I never even thought about that being a gender thing. I just loved it. I was like, Why do other people not enjoy this as much? So because of that, I went to M.I.T. The curriculum is so mathematical. Everything is numbers. It was this idea of this world that I lived in.

I actually wrote my application essay to M.I.T. on how my life revolved around the number two. I was born on Feb. 2. I had these two identities, American and Indian. I was the second daughter. I saw a lot of creativity in numbers. Even when I danced, I saw it all as geometry. People always think of writing and the arts as the creative side, but to me, math and science were actually really creative.

Did you work during the summers?

After my sophomore year, I worked in investment banking at JPMorgan Chase in their natural resources group. It was long hours. I don’t know if I fully understood what I was doing at the time, to be completely honest. I met people there who I knew loved their jobs, and I started seeing people who hated their jobs, which is most people.

Dance was also really important. Growing up, I would compete on the weekends at Indian cultural dance competitions. And at M.I.T., there was no Indian dance group on campus, so I went and created it. It still exists today.

You went to work at Bain after college. Did you have a good experience there?

I always loved business, but I also didn’t feel like I was going to fit into the traditional corporate American business model. I just always had this passionate feminine energy to me, and I kind of knew that I always wanted to continue to change the landscape. Then I just really loved the people I met there. They just seemed like human beings. I didn’t feel judged for being a small, petite Indian woman.

And I actually feel like Bain, for me, was my college experience, because I didn’t really have one at M.I.T. A lot of the people who were with me at Bain then went on to found consumer companies like Birchbox, Warby Parker and Harry’s. We were all entrepreneurial. We didn’t want to get stuck in the grind of needing to just be monkeys in the office. To this day, we all call each other up.