USD Alumnae Rewrite the Path to Tech

When Grace Daly, Monica Ramakrishnan, and Sukhpreet Bains graduated from the University of San Diego in 2015, they were three acquaintances from three different majors headed in three different directions, from finance to data science to international business.

What the graduates couldn’t predict was that their seemingly scattered academic paths would eventually lead them to the same destination: the fast-paced world of tech. Today their friendships are in full bloom as are their careers at Adobe, Google and Adyen, where their diverse USD backgrounds have proved to be their greatest strength. 

From Classroom to Career

For Grace Daly, the path to tech wasn’t obvious at first. Armed with a Knauss School of Business degree in business economics, plus minors in finance and Spanish, she had initially set her sights on banking. But when traditional finance roles left her uninspired, she took a chance on interviewing with tech giant, Adobe—a decision that would shape the next decade of her career. 

Nine years later, Grace has leveraged her analytical mindset—a skillset not all marketers have, which, in her words, makes her “very dangerous”—at Adobe across operations, customer success, strategy, software implementation, and now marketing. 

As senior manager of marketing and customer strategy, she now manages integrated campaigns for a stack of products. “Never in a million years would I have expected that I would end up in marketing,” Grace admits. “But it’s always been about what’s the next interesting challenge and what’s the next skill that I can learn.”

Monica Ramakrishnan’s journey, while rooted in technology, took its own unexpected turns. Growing up in the Bay Area, tech was ingrained in her upbringing, but her first taste of website development during a freshman year internship left her cold. “I hated it,” Monica recalled. Instead, she leaned into what she had loved since high school—debate—and discovered her knack for using facts to win arguments could actually become her career path. Monica majored in mathematics, with a minor in computer science, and became a product analyst at Adobe for nearly five years. 

Today, she’s a senior data scientist at Google, where she leads product analytics across four different areas of Google search. Using statistical analysis to improve user experiences, “I’m able to lead and own a specific vertical that is a lot more complicated and in depth than people might actually think—and that has been really helpful in my career.”

Sukhpreet Bains’ path was perhaps the most winding of all. After changing her major five times at USD before settling on business administration with a minor in international relations, she found her way to tech through an enterprise sales internship at Apple. From there, she chose to go the startup route, working at companies like Affirm, Flexport and Plaid before landing at Adyen where she works today. 

In her strategic partnership role at Adyen, responsible for growing top-line revenue, Sukhpreet notes, “I think one aspect that I didn’t know going in was the importance of psychology. People ultimately want to work with people they like and respect—especially when there’s an exchange of dollars involved.”

Photo album: Monica Ramakrishnan, Grace Daly and Sukhpreet Bains share their experiences with Knauss students at an event titled, "Career Paths in Technology" last October.

Success Through Boldness — and Each Other

What surprised them most about the tech industry? “I was shocked by how much opportunity there was to make an impact right from the get-go,” Grace says of Adobe. Sukhpreet has experienced the same at her various start-ups. “Every time I put my hand up and said, ‘I don’t know if I can do it, but I feel bold enough to try,’ it was rewarded.” 

The three alumnae have continued to seize their opportunities, even if they’re beyond their comfort zones. “The autonomy and weight they gave my voice was terrifying but also really empowering,” Grace says.

Though separated by geography—Monica and Sukhpreet in New York, Grace in San Diego—their shared experiences have forged a strong bond. They are each other’s support system to embrace the challenges and advocate for others in the industry, especially women in tech around salary transparency. “Being open to talk about money allows women to make more money, and if you don’t talk about it then it just doesn’t happen,” Sukhpreet says.

Words of Wisdom

Drawing from their diverse paths and collective decade in tech, the graduates have some hard-won insights to offer. It starts with initiative, according to Sukhpreet. “Don’t be shy to reach out to alums,” she says, and encourages students to proactively seek out internships in tech. 

Monica agrees that there is value in each experience, adding, “every internship makes the next one even easier to get, but it also helps you narrow down what you like and what you don’t like.”

Their greatest shared message: embracing uncertainty. As Sukhpreet says, “not many people have a very clear line of sight into what their career is going to be. As a matter of fact, our careers are still building. There is so much ahead.”

— Katie Payne