Priyan Sathianathan

Priyan Sathianathan is a third-year IEOR major originally from State College, Pennsylvania, who now hails from Irvine, California. 

Priyan first got into IEOR as a discipline because it focused on a big-picture look at engineering processes. His particular interests lay in project change and organizational oversight as opposed to design minutiae, and he found IEOR as the engineering field that checked all those boxes. His dream job is as a NASA payload risk analyst, and Priyan is getting himself one step closer to his goal by interning for Boeing this summer!

Priyan’s favorite IEOR class was IEOR 165 with Professor Righter. He found it very fundamental and elegant, especially with regard to understanding the math on which models are built. His favorite non-IEOR class was one of his humanities breadths, Italian Studies 170, which was a film class taught by a visiting professor on how the city of Rome is constructed as a symbol in cinema throughout time. 

Priyan’s advice to first year students is to take IEOR classes as soon as you can. He says that there is no way to understand what you are doing before you start. Starting early also allows you the necessary foundations to understand what topics you are particularly interested in and more importantly, leaves you time later to cater to your personal passions. His non-academic advice to first-year IEOR students, and just students in general,  is to pick your passion and to perpetually fulfill yourself by filling up your schedule and dropping the activities you don’t enjoy. College is truly about finding who you are, and that can mean trying lots of things until you hone in on one you really like. For Priyan, it’s launching rockets. One other thing that Priyan is passionate about, and wants to add, is that Cheeseboard is better than Sliver no matter what anyone says. 
As for what he wants to do in the future, Priyan’s dream travel destination is the Maldives because he wants to scuba dive, and he generally enjoys warm beachy places. He invites people to reach out to him at priyans@berkeley.edu to ask him about classes, IEOR or otherwise, or just generally stop by for a chat!