Varun Sheel

Emory University, Goizueta Business School

“Neuroscientist turned indie pop artist!”

Hometown: Amherst, MA

Fun Fact About Yourself:
I make indie pop music now but the first songs I learned to play on guitar were hardcore metal tracks. I just really wanted to learn how to shred! It’s been a journey getting to this point, but it’s certainly been a lifelong lesson in adapting and finding what works for you.

Undergraduate School and Major:
UMass Amherst – B.S. in Psychology & Neuroscience
UMass Amherst – M.S. in Molecular and Cellular Biology

Most Recent Employer and Job Title:
Self employed as a professional songwriter, producer and indie pop artist! Prior to that, I was a Senior Associate Scientist at ElevateBio.

What makes Atlanta such a great place to earn an MBA? Atlanta feels like a city that just buzzes with momentum. There’s an incredibly creative pulse here, not only in the arts, but in the way every person thinks and builds something for themselves. As someone who’s trying to bridge business and music, it’s a perfect place to start something truly special that may not fit in a conventional mold. It’s a city that will let you stay grounded and true to who you are, all while providing you with opportunities to expand how you operate.

Aside from your classmates and location, what was the key part of Emory Goizueta’s MBA programming that led you to choose this business school and why was it so important to you? I find practical experience to be invaluable. It’s one thing to learn how to do something in school – but to apply it? To adjust and optimize in the real world and figure out how to leverage your learnings in a way unique to your circumstances? Those are the lessons that stay with you for your entire life. Emory’s Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation and the Hatchery were huge draws for me. These resources allow me to gain that practical experience and learn the language of business while staying rooted in purpose. It’s a safe and secure environment for me to put what I’ll learn to the test and that’s truly special.

What course, club or activity excites you the most at Emory Goizueta? It would be anything tied to early-stage venture creation. As mentioned before, The Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation and the Hatchery are organizations that I’m incredibly excited to be involved with. I want to sharpen my business skills as they pertain to my creative endeavors and I’m looking forward to building something together with my like-minded peers. If there’s a place where my music, my brand and business strategy can overlap, I’m excited to get involved and grow alongside my classmates.

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far: I’ve been playing music my entire life. I’ve been playing guitar for over twenty years and singing for just as long. Music has always been a huge part of my identity. However, I’m trained as a scientist. Over the last decade of my life, music was put on the backburner and science was front-and-center. It was never both and that’s because I never thought I could do both.

After losing my biotech job, I did some soul searching. I decided that while I was good at it and I enjoyed it, I felt incomplete living a life without music and I wanted to fix that. If anything, I had the time right now thanks to my unemployment. So I started finishing up some songs I had written over the years, releasing and marketing them. I’m truly blessed because after almost a year of doing so, I’m able to call this my full-time job. However, the wonderful part of all this isn’t the hundreds of thousands of streams. It isn’t the magazine features or fans messaging me about how much they love the track. Don’t get me wrong, all of that truly means the world to me. The support from everyone is incredibly humbling and it inspires me to be a better artist. The best part, truly, is that I wouldn’t have reached this place without my scientific background and my knowledge of data driven decision making.

My ability to understand my metrics, run marketing campaigns and make decisions off of the conclusions from tests or experiments I run with my tracks is a way of thinking that I had ingrained in me throughout my scientific training. As a result, I’m actually excited for both sides of each release. The creation and the analytical optimization. My greatest accomplishment so far is realizing I can do both, science and music, and for the first time in my life, I feel complete.

Looking ahead two years, what would make your Emory MBA experience a success?
Success would mean leaving Goizueta with the tools to scale what I have already started. It would mean turning a self-funded music career into something scalable, financially sustainable and strategically sound. Long term, I want to build creative first ventures that respect both the art and the existing infrastructure behind it. I want to deepen my understanding of business models, capital strategy, and venture design, not only for the sake of learning, but to also apply them in real world scenarios. If in two years, I can build a model that lets me grow as an artist while supporting others to do the same – all while finding a community of people who believe in that vision – well, that sounds absolutely perfect to me.

DON’T MISS: MEET THE MBA CLASS OF 2027: STUDENTS TODAY, LEADERS TOMORROW, INNOVATORS ALWAYS

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