Meet the MBA Class of 2027: Prabhash Chauhan, Yale SOM

“I’ve worked at the cusp of government, industry, and data”

Prabhash Chauhan

Yale School of Management

Hometown: New Delhi, Delhi, India

Fun Fact About Yourself: Won Shell Eco-Marathon India; our prototype achieved 362 mpg on gasoline—pure engineering joy for me.

Undergraduate School and Major: Delhi Technological University — B.Tech, Mechanical Engineering (2020)

Most Recent Employer and Job Title: Invest India — Manager at Project Monitoring Group (PMG)

The Yale School of Management is regarded as a purpose-driven program. What is your mission? How will your MBA at Yale SOM help you fulfill that mission? My mission is to use data and cross-sector coalitions to improve decision-making and provide solutions at scale. At Invest India, I helped institutionalize milestone-based monitoring across ~1,600 infrastructure projects (~$520B), reducing delays 12–25% and averting significant overruns. Yale SOM sharpens the execution muscle behind such missions. The integrated curriculum trains me to understand stakeholders; CELI and Yale’s ecosystem expose me to leaders who decide under uncertainty; and analytics and operations electives and financial education will also deepen my technical rigor. I aim to translate evidence into accountable roadmaps, build incentive-aligned partnerships, and graduate with a repeatable playbook for scaling businesses and social impact programs responsibly.

Aside from your classmates, what was the key part of Yale SOM’s MBA curriculum or programming that led you to choose this business school and why was it so important to you? The Chief Executive Leadership Institute (CELI) was a decisive offering for me. I’ve supported senior decision-makers and saw how real choices rarely fit textbook cases—compressed timelines, incomplete data, political constraints. CELI offers unvarnished access to CEOs, heads of state, and policymakers grappling with ambiguity in real time. I want to study not only “what should be done”, but how leaders mobilize partnerships, approach trade-offs, and communicate credible commitments. Pairing this exposure with research opportunities lets me convert leader insights into structured frameworks I and my teams can apply. CELI is where my background in intersects with pragmatic, high-stakes decision science—exactly the preparation achieves my mission.

What course, club, or activity excites you the most at Yale SOM? I’m most excited by engaging with CELI’s research and summits while pairing that with the Consulting Club and Impact Investing Club. CELI gives me a front-row seat to how executives handle complexity; the clubs help translate those insights into structured problem-solving, hypothesis-driven analysis, and client-ready communications. I’ll also lean into financial and operations electives to master all aspects of running and understanding a business.

What is your unique quality that will enable you to make a big contribution to the Class of 2027? I’ve worked at the cusp of government, industry, and data—comfortable with ministers and economists, memos and models. I’ve also led an 8-member team, aligned multi-agency stakeholders, and built R/Python pipelines (196 trade reports) while training 150+ colleagues to use AI tools.

This combination of operational know how and analytical rigor lets me distill messy, cross-stakeholder problems into trackable, incentive-aligned plans. In class, I’ll stress-test my learnings on the ground from infrastructure delivery against academic insights; on teams, I’ll bring analytics, cross cultural insights, and a unique point of view about systems and norms.

My biggest contribution would be if I can help multiply others’ impact: getting to know them and their missions, learning from them and helping them achieve small goals along the wat

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far Institutionalizing a milestone-based monitoring framework for ~1,600 under-construction projects (~$520B) across India. The work required stitching together ministries, state governments, and private developers and bringing them onto a single platform. From there, I designed incentives and escalation mechanisms that changed behavior. We helped avert billions in cost overruns by making bottlenecks visible, time-bound, and jointly-owned. I’m proudest that the system endured beyond any one meeting, we codified templates and created feedback loops that improved data quality each month. It proved that rigor plus collaboration can move national-scale programs—and taught me to translate analytics into credible, humane execution.

What do you hope to do after graduation? I am aiming to join a top consulting firm focused on financial, infrastructure, and public-sector solution delivery. I want to deepen a profit-focused playbook that blends analytics, human-centered operations, and change management to solve complex business problems, unlock profitable growth, and ensure reliable, repeatable execution. In the long term, I wish to build a business venture that helps enterprises solve their problems and also execute profitable public-sector work.

Advice for future Yale SOM applicants: Yale SOM is unapologetically mission-driven. Lead with your “why,” then prove it with outcomes—how you advanced that mission across roles. Show cross-sector fluency by explaining how you navigated business or society and what each taught you. Engage deeply with the community: attend events, speak with students/alumni, and reflect specific takeaways in your essays. Finally, be candid about misses and feedback you acted on—SOM values self-aware leaders who learn fast, scale impact, and help others do the same.

DON’T MISS: MEET YALE SOM’S MBA CLASS OF 2027

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