Back in the Game
At Booth, Nisha Bhuva, MBA ’24, was looking for a business foundation to complement her technical background. Along the way, she found her calling.
- By
- September 02, 2026
- Media, Entertainment, and Sports
On a visit home to Tennessee after graduating from Booth, Nisha Bhuva, MBA ’24, volunteered at a Korn Ferry Tour golf championship. She did it for fun—but by the end of the event, she was fired up and exploring job opportunities in golf.
Sports and competition have always been part of Bhuva’s life. In high school, she played competitive tennis and had a job selling sporting goods. In her undergrad years at Northwestern University, she interned at Under Armour and continued playing tennis, practicing when the club could get court time—9 to 11 p.m.
After earning her degree in industrial engineering, she took a job as a software engineer at Capital One before moving into product management. The career made sense, and she was good at it.
The Perfect Fit
Four years into her career, Bhuva decided to pursue a Full-Time MBA at Booth. She wanted a business foundation to complement her technical background. What she didn’t expect was to have her career plans upended.
Surrounded by classmates chasing fields they loved, she started asking harder questions. Was she as passionate about her career as they were about theirs? She wasn’t.
“I started thinking about what really inspired me when I was younger,” she says. Two themes that stood out were sports and gaming.
Through Booth’s Media, Entertainment & Sports Group, she found classmates who shared her interests: people who spent time trading industry news, attending conferences, and mapping out their own paths in the industry. Meanwhile, the Lab in Developing New Products and Services, taught by Arthur Middlebrooks, the James M. Kilts Jr. Clinical Professor of Marketing, sharpened her product instincts and her ability to think from a customer’s perspective.
By her second year, she knew what she wanted: product management, with a different industry spin. She just needed to find the right opportunity.
After volunteering for Korn Ferry, Bhuva looked at the United States Golf Association’s website.
“I saw a position that was really up my alley,” Bhuva says. “It was a product role managing an app and website. They were looking for someone with prior product management experience who was interested in the golf world.”
She applied for the job and got it.
Bhuva is now a product manager for USGA Deacon, a technology platform that synthesizes data from smart golf balls and other hardware tools to guide course maintenance decisions. The tool was in its early stages while Bhuva was still at Booth; now, it’s used on hundreds of golf courses and at every USGA championship.
Each day, golf course superintendents use the platform to make maintenance decisions such as how much to water and mow. These decisions affect how fast the ball rolls on the green and how the course plays.
“Maintaining a golf course is really an art and a science,” Bhuva says. She credits the Interpersonal Dynamics course, taught by Lisa Stefanac, MBA ’09, clinical professor of leadership, for giving her the confidence to work with people whose expertise is different from her own. On the field, she now leverages that learning to connect with a variety of course superintendents and maintenance crews.
“Now, the game is changing and incorporating more young people and minorities, and I wanted to be part of that.”
— Nisha Bhuva
Bringing Others to the Game
Since taking the job, Bhuva has been working on her golf game. She didn’t grow up playing golf, nor did anyone in her family. And when she was younger, she felt the game was somewhat inaccessible. “Now, the game is changing and incorporating more young people and minorities, and I wanted to be part of that,” she says, citing some recent stats. According to the National Golf Foundation, female representation among golfers has increased from 20 percent in 2012 to its highest-ever proportion, 28 percent, in 2026. Asian, Black, and Hispanic golfers represented a record high of 26 percent of traditional golfers in 2025.
In June, Bhuva invited a dozen Booth classmates to walk the third round of the US Open at Shinnecock Hills in Long Island, New York.
The group settled into the stands with a view of both the ninth green and the 14th tee box. As play wrapped up for the day, and Bhuva looked down the course to see USGA crew members moving across the green, using the tools her team manages to assess conditions. They collected data, preparing for the next day’s round.
Her classmates watched the golfers making their way in one direction; she watched the crew in the other.