How to succeed in business with a computer science master ... Ranjeeta got an MBA!

Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business was the perfect place to merge the two!

A master’s degree in computer science will make you a skilled technician and ace at robotics and artificial intelligence. But will it help you succeed in business?

Ranjeeta Singh wasn’t sure. After graduating with a master’s in computer science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, she made a beeline for Silicon Valley (almost 3,000 miles away from the bitter cold of Troy, NY, winters), and landed a job at the tech behemoth Intel.

During her 18-year career there, she went from strength to strength, rising from a planning manager to a senior director. But something was missing: a comprehensive view of the business landscape. With an eye on leadership jobs, she wanted to hone her management skills and discovered the Saturday MBA program at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business.

“I wanted to stay in the technology arena and Leavey was a good choice because most of my classmates and friends were from technology backgrounds,” she said. “I also thought it would be really valuable to build my network if I was going to stay in the tech space.”

She quickly acquired the professional connections and the community she had longed for.

“What I loved most about the Saturday MBA was that it was a cohort program. It actually helped me forge a really strong bond with some of my classmates because we were together for three years,” she said.

At Leavey, where she received her MBA in 2007, she also found mentors, professors who schooled her in such diverse niches as management, real estate, and finance. The professors taught her something just as important as business savvy: a newfound confidence.

She recalls a class where she was assigned a CEO role in a group exercise, and she hesitated to embrace the role of leader until a professor told her, “You were assigned the CEO role among all the students. You have to believe in yourself, and you have to see yourself from my lens and the lens of others. You underestimate your potential.”

Those words resonated particularly during her years at Intel, which she describes as “heavily male dominated” during her tenure there. Being a woman “came with its own set of challenges,” she recalled because, although she excelled at her job, she found it daunting to be one of a few women at a senior level.

“Then when you add women of color to it, that makes it even more difficult,” said Ranjeeta, who was born and raised in India, where she earned her BS in Computer Science from Birla Institute of Technology, located in the town of Mesra.

When she left Intel seeking more leadership opportunities in 2018, eleven years after earning her MBA, she signed on as vice president and general manager of data science and artificial intelligence (AI) at Teradata, an enterprise software company that develops and sells database analytics software subscriptions.

In 2020 she made yet another career leap when she was tapped to be the chief product officer at Climate Corporation, which creates advanced technologies to help farmers across the world sustainably increase their productivity.

The management mojo and confidence she’d gained at Leavey had served her well. She found support, too, in her Saturday cohort. “We really built a strong bond with each other,” she said. “In fact, I am still very much in contact with some of my classmates.”