
With an interest in pivoting from a career in engineering to marketing, Ritvik decided to embark on his MBA journey within the Evening MBA program at Chicago Booth.
- By
- January 20, 2023
- Part-Time MBA Stories
I was born in India and moved to the United States when I was seven years old. I grew up in Kansas and went to Texas A&M University for undergrad where I studied biomedical engineering. Right after undergrad, I got my Masters in Bioengineering from Rice University. Pre-Booth, I worked at Abbott Laboratories as a systems engineer and worked there up until I started at Invisalign. While I started on the engineering track as an associate engineer and received a promotion shortly after, I soon realized that I didn’t want to be an engineer in the long-term.
I saw decisions were really being made by managers within the marketing department. I knew that pivoting from an engineering background to a marketing role would be a challenging switch. I decided to attend a Booth admissions event, which helped me kick start my MBA journey.
While at Booth, I made the transition within Abbott to a product marketing role just nine months after enrolling in the Part-Time MBA Program. Following my graduation from Booth, it was time to look for other job opportunities and I was fortunate enough to land a role at Invisalign as a Global Product Manager. And this past summer, I received a promotion to Senior Global Product Manager. In my role, I focus on both upstream technical product management and downstream commercial marketing. This allows me to take leadership of a product from early concept/research to global launch. The breadth of stakeholders that I collaborate with span R&D, Legal, Regional partners, Sales, executive leadership and customers. With that in mind, a lot of the global product managers at Invisalign operate in a similar way. This has given me a broad perspective on the business which product managers in other industries and companies are not privy to. I love my job and am very excited for what the future holds.
Part of why I got my product manager role at Abbott was due to my manager being a Booth alum. At that point, I knew the Abbott business model pretty well and I’d taken a few core marketing strategy courses, which positioned me to be able to learn on the go. Even without a ton of marketing experience, my manager knew that, because I went to Booth, I had the potential to learn how to be a successful product manager.
I often find myself using skills that I learned during my time at Booth in my current role. For example, my coworkers were looking at building a product in the marketplace and needed to figure out how to price the product. I pulled out my pricing strategy notes and made a presentation to provide an overview of pricing by using the value-based pricing model. Booth also taught me how to effectively communicate with people who don’t have a lot of time on their hands—my experiences in and outside of the classroom prepared me to make it a priority to get my point across in a short amount of time.
I took Leadership Studio with Professor Harry Davis. At Booth, one of the mottos I hear often is to promote lifelong learning. Yes, one could take the occasional seminar or webinar, but ultimately how can we put that learning into practice? Professor Davis’s course addresses that question as Leadership Studio pushes students to experiment in their personal and professional lives. In doing so, we’re able to gain a better understanding of who we are as individuals. Leadership Studio taught me how to look at each aspect of myself as a character—this unique perspective allowed me to understand how I could bring certain versions of myself to life in different environments.
New Venture Strategy with Professor James Schrager was a great way to end my time at Booth. It’s an intense class with a ton of real world applications incorporated into the curriculum. I learned so much about how startups work, which I found to be a great benefit because I was looking at startup companies during my job search. Even after the course ended, Professor Schrager invited us back for a follow-up class available for alumni to join after taking his course. This course was definitely my favorite at Booth.
The Booth network is a massive return on investment for Boothies. I’ve met so many Booth alums at work and in passing. Funny story, a few Boothies and I went to the Midway Club one day and I met an alum who worked at P&G. He told me he was also an engineer that switched into marketing. We met up again a week later and he was more than happy to walk me through his path and he gave me some useful words of advice, too. When I joined the marketing team at Abbott, I found out my director at Abbott worked with him too, small world! Boothies are always happy to chat and willing to put you in contact with their connections, which is truly rewarding.
Booth immediately helped me as an alum through my interactions with the Career Services department. The September following graduation, I started to feel like I was coasting at work—conversations about career advancement weren’t happening like I anticipated, so I wanted to look for other opportunities. With that in mind, I decided to reach out to my Career Services advisor who welcomed me to stop by and walk through refreshing my resume before applying to jobs. Within a month, a recruiter from Invisalign reached out to me on LinkedIn to interview. In late December, I got my job offer and I’ve been at Invisalign ever since. I appreciated the one-on-one time I had with my advisor to help me improve my candidacy for jobs—Booth is definitely a great resource that I know I can count on for a lifetime.