Aditi Ramakrishnan

MIT, Sloan School of Management

“Right-brained consultant, left-brained musician working hard to achieve educational equity and make my friends laugh.”

Hometown: Bangalore, India

Fun fact about yourself: I’m an Indian classical singer and big-time theater aficionado (I minored in acting as an undergraduate). I deeply appreciate any opportunity to do right-brain things! I’ll always remember being in the cast of our spring musical at the MIT Musical Theater Guild during my second semester at MIT Sloan.

Undergraduate School and Degree: UC Berkeley, BA Economics & BS Business Administration (Minor in Theater, Dance & Performance Studies)

Where was the last place you worked before enrolling in business school? Dalberg Advisors, a social impact and economic development consulting firm. I was a Senior Consultant.

Where did you intern during the summer of 2025? Sana Labs, which was split across working in Stockholm and New York City.

Where will you be working after graduation? Sana Labs; Engagement Manager

Community Work and Leadership Roles in Business School:

Awards & Honors:

• One of 5 Class of ‘26 Siebel Scholar Award recipients MIT Sloan (78 students were selected worldwide)
• MIT Arts Scholar, 2026

Community Work & Leadership Roles:

• TA – Competitive Strategy (Fall ’25) & Product Design and Development (Spring ‘26)
• Co-President & former VP of Social Impact Design, MIT Sloan Design Club
• SVP of Content, MIT Sloan Product & Tech Conference 2025
• VP of Projects & Healthcare AI Project Lead, MIT Sloan Entrepreneurs for International Development
• Core Mentor to two core teams of first-year students and members of Core Mentor Selection Committee for future cohort
• Curriculum Designer, MIT Sloan Prison Education Initiative
• AdMIT Day & Admissions Volunteer; MIT Sloan student representative at internal and external events, with a focus on international students
• Selected to represent the MBA incoming Class of 2026 to advise incoming Dean Richard Locke on the MIT Sloan student experience during his transition
• Graduate Community Fellow (GCF), MIT Writing & Communications Center
• Ensemble cast actor, MIT Musical Theater Guild (spring 25) and Sloan Follies improv comedy club (spring 2025)

 Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? I’m proudest of shaping and contributing to the 2025 Sloan Product & Tech Conference while serving as the SVP of Content Planning. Coming from a non-tech, non-U.S. located career, it was a lesson in both harnessing my existing skills and getting creative to fill gaps. I leveraged my consulting experience to craft a storyline that integrated the ambitious range of threads we were representing. This allowed us to put fashion and sustainability in conversation with industrial robotics, and video game design with women’s health and biotech. Great insights grew out of these cross-industry conversations.

Implementing this storyline also meant I had to cast an immensely wide net to land speakers who represented the best of our themes. Harnessing every relationship I’d built, I tapped into everything from my network of undergrad club mates to someone I met on a flight. This yielded dividends, ushering in eight speakers and a keynote from across edtech and design, Big Tech, and new startups.

My work on this yielded a unanimous nomination to lead the conference’s next edition. That recognition meant a lot and further inspired me to lean into continually investing in strong relationships and network-building and putting this into good use. From serving as a core mentor to first-year MIT Sloan MBAs to supporting friends as they are recruited, I’m proud of the ability to create connections across space and time.

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? Starting off my career in economic development in India invoked many moments of pride and gratitude. But one achievement I’ll carry with me is telling a Fortune 500 client their initial hypothesis was wrong. A large tech company wanted to place its devices in every government school across India to revolutionize educational equity after experiencing success with this approach in the U.S. As my manager and I modeled different procurement scenarios and spoke to teachers, procurement managers, and school administrators, we repeatedly unearthed insurmountable challenges hampering this goal: everything from variable electricity access to a lack of trust in new devices. We could have massaged the story, but instead we remained honest about how their devices weren’t the silver bullet they had hoped to see. We were able to advise them to reimagine their approach entirely with a focus on deep state-level partnerships over a glamorous national rollout, and reaching underserved audiences like stay-at-home mothers navigating a digital literacy gap. The project resulted in a pivot to market creation with dedicated country leadership. I’m proud that our willingness to challenge the brief didn’t end the relationship, but instead deepened it. And I’m happy I didn’t budge from the truth revealed in the data.

 Why did you choose this business school? I’m a deferred (2+2) admit, so I picked MIT Sloan when I was 21 years old and fresh out of my undergraduate school. Even before I had the vocabulary to describe it, I felt drawn to how people at MIT Sloan obsessed over solving the problems they cared about irrespective of external validation or glamor quotient. Above all, I noticed how they consistently practiced kindness and, most importantly, a tendency to not take themselves too seriously.

It’s in this inspired combination of brilliance, humility, and goofiness that I find I am my best self and do my best work. And it turns out, my 21-year-old gut feeling paid off!

Who was your favorite MBA professor? I’ve learned from some truly remarkable MIT Sloan educators here, and a favorite has been Professor of the Practice Rama Ramakrishnan. Prof. Ramakrishnan added a new dimension to my perception of good teaching: kindness. He teaches Hands-On Deep Learning to a largely non-technical audience of MBAs, but does so uncompromisingly — without stripping away critical detail or rigor — and with kindness. No question is too small and no challenge too big in his class. I’ve always wanted to be an educator myself, and I’ve learned from Prof. Ramakrishnan — in addition to the meaning of stochastic gradient descent — that the most powerful, thoughtful teaching doesn’t allow room for excuses. Instead, it sets a high bar, gives you the tools to clear it, and cheers you on when you do.

 What was your favorite course as an MBA? The most memorable class I’ve had in life – not just as an MBA – was called How to Make Almost Anything. This is a class on personal fabrication, ambitiously covering nearly 20 fabrication techniques from 3D printing to electronics manufacturing within a semester. It was chock-full of engineers, architects, and designers, with a grand total of two Sloanies. I have never been less equipped and less familiar than in any other setting. I’d describe my journey not as an upward climb, but as an erratic pole vault into the unknown, involving many leaps of faith and shameless requests for help from unbelievably patient TAs.

By the end of the semester, not only did I develop a (somewhat) working model of an Indian classical music pitch detector, but I also experienced the highest highs (literally – I made a tall shelf) and lowest lows (crying over a soldering iron or incorrectly milled copper piece in a lab at 4 am) of my MBA experience. I credit this class with helping me build comfort with failure (repeatedly), familiarity with the unknown (everyday), and habit out of seeking help from those who know better (constantly) – while paying it forward, even if only over the two weeks when I knew what I was doing.

What was your favorite MBA event or tradition at your business school? Before we started the first semester, our class went on optional, curated small-group trips called “pre-functions.” I’m forever grateful to my Acadia pre-function for gifting me both best friends and core memories. In particular, one memory stands out: on our first night, the trip leaders organized us into small teams for a friendly cooking competition to break the ice while we made dinner. A crazy stroke of inspiration led me to convince my team to make biryani, a complex meat and rice dish that would take any tenured chef at least two hours. We ended up taking four hours – meaning our dish was ready after everyone else had finished cooking, eating, and indulged in dessert. But to my pleasant surprise, everyone remained supportive, if slightly amused, and came back to enjoy a second dinner when we were ready.

This was a great introduction to MIT Sloan: I learned people will always get behind your most ambitious, crazy ideas and show up to support, all while keeping you humble along the way.

Looking back over your MBA experience, what is the one thing you’d do differently and why? I entered school with a lightweight intellectual curiosity about entrepreneurship but quickly became more interested in other pursuits – product, design, and analytics. While I don’t regret this—and know that business school involves making tradeoffs—in another world I’d probably have given entrepreneurship a genuine shot and built out some of my ideas end-to-end.

What was the most impactful case study you had in business school and what was the biggest lesson you learned from it?

While I haven’t taken many case study-centered classes at MIT Sloan, I really enjoyed the IDEO x Singapore Ministry of Manpower case in my Product Design & Development class.

MoM had built perhaps the most efficient permit-processing system in the world, but when they presented the design for new center waiting rooms for highly skilled foreign professionals, leadership asked: Why do applicants have to wait at all? I found that to be a bold reframe. By bringing in IDEO and empathizing with what a newly-arrived professional feels—stress, uncertainty, and the weight of starting a new life—they transformed a government office into something that felt more like a hotel lobby with roaming concierges, facilities for dressing and grooming, and toys for children.

When the Ministry built with a focus on applicants’ experiences and emotions, they ended up processing 95% of visitors in under 15 minutes. I loved learning how deep efficiency gains can come from simple, empathetic human-centered design. This case amended my view of public services, challenging me to dream of systems that make people feel seen, heard, and instilled with a sense of pride.

What business leader do you admire most? That would be Safeena Husain, the founder of Educate Girls, one of India’s largest and most sweepingly impactful nonprofits. I admire Safeena for her crystal-clear identification of her life’s purpose, bold experimentation on how to make it happen, and, most importantly, for never backing down. Enrolling more than two million girls in school and ensuring that over 90% of them graduate is no small feat when everything is working against you, from a pandemic to longstanding gender roles and social norms.

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? Unsurprisingly for a tech-focused school, MIT is an early adopter and thoughtful experimenter with AI. Our orientation, in addition to team-building and campus tours, included a two-hour masterclass series with Professor Eric So, leader of many of MIT Sloan’s AI initiatives. This covered topics including careful prompting, non-traditional business use cases, and checks and balances. I found it helpful to distill the ever-expanding best practice literature into a practical checklist. Each semester, there’s a growing list of course offerings on GenAI (e.g., GenAI Lab, GenAI for Managers). Finally, we’re actively encouraged to use AI in our classes in different ways, from creating entire deliverables to helping find key details in cases.

Which MBA classmate do you most admire?  My friend Chris Hayden for the courage to care obsessively and dive headfirst into devilish details in a world that prizes moving on quickly. I admire how unwaveringly Chris cares regardless of who’s on the receiving end, whether it’s lucky friends like me or the inmates he teaches through the MIT Prison Education Initiative.

What are the top two items on your professional bucket list?

1. I’m a longtime generalist, so I want to experience the opposite. I hope to build deep expertise in learning and education to the point of being able to advise or teach on this subject with confidence.

2. I’ve spent my professional life flitting between public and private sector work and traveling between India and the U.S., observing the best of both as well as their shortfalls. My ultimate goal is to return to India and bridge these gaps, deploying bespoke human-centered technology projects to deliver educational equity at scale.

What made Aditi such an invaluable addition to the Class of 2026?

“It is a pleasure to nominate Aditi Ramakrishnan, whose contributions to MIT Sloan exemplify the spirit, engagement, and integrity we hope to see in every member of our community. Aditi consistently demonstrates thoughtful leadership, academic curiosity, and a deep commitment to strengthening the Sloan experience for her peers. Aditi approaches the rigor of MIT Sloan with intention and enthusiasm. Her academic path reflects both discipline and creativity—from serving as a Teaching Assistant for Strategy to enrolling in How to Make (Almost) Anything at the MIT Media Lab, where she embraced hands‑on, interdisciplinary learning. She seeks challenges not for their own sake, but to broaden her perspective and contribute more meaningfully to the communities she engages with across MIT. Her intentional approach to academic and co‑curricular choices reflects her thoughtful engagement and her desire to challenge herself and contribute meaningfully.

Her leadership beyond the classroom is equally noteworthy. As co‑president of the Design Club, an officer in Sloan Entrepreneurs for International Development, a core mentor, and a contributor to the Sloan Tech Summit, Aditi invests deeply in initiatives that enhance student life and foster collaboration. Her perspective was recognized as thoughtful and forward‑looking in a student luncheon with Dean Richard Locke, and her candor and insight were equally valued while meeting with members of the MIT Visiting Committee. What stands out most about Aditi is the way she navigates the many opportunities and demands of the MBA experience with reflection and purpose, approaching MIT Sloan not only as a place to learn, but as a community to contribute to and grow with. Across all these efforts she has embodied selflessness, integrity, and a sincere desire to leave people and places better than she found them.”

Nia DeYounge
Director of the Student Life Office
MIT Sloan School of Management

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