Yash Bandari
Yash Bhandari is third-year IEOR major hailing from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, who found his way to industrial engineering after entering Berkeley as a Materials Science & Engineering (MSE) major. After some time, Yash came to feel that the MSE curriculum didn’t align with his true interests, and began exploring alternatives. When a close friend studying IEOR introduced him to the major, Yash immediately connected with the versatile skillset the curriculum offered, stating that “the interdisciplinary nature of the major, the intersection of maths, sciences, and business, was what piqued my interest.”
Since switching majors, Yash has found great academic, social, and professional success in his IEOR-related coursework, organizations, and internships.
Yash’s favorite class this semester has been IEOR 151 (Service Operations and Design), taught by Professor Anil Aswani. Yash has especially enjoyed “learning powerful statistical techniques to drive insights on how to make processes more efficient… [IEOR 151] applies a broad range of real-life applications and techniques, helping us become better designers and decision makers.”
Outside of his IEOR coursework, Yash involves himself in a variety of extracurricular organizations, related both directly and indirectly to his professional goals. Outside of IEOR, Yash works with Consult Your Community (CYC), a pro-bono consulting organization founded at Berkeley that offers its services to small businesses and startups that often can’t access support. Having led and worked on multiple projects “from tackling food insecurity in Berkeley to sourcing a universe of potential acquirers for a Swedish Ed-Tech start-up,” Yash now serves as the club’s Internal Vice President, and is grateful to CYC for introducing him to many of his close friends, honing his leadership abilities, and for the opportunities to practice skills learned in his IEOR courses.
Yash has also spent the last two summers interring, once with Bain & Company India, a global consultancy, and more recently with Jordan Park, a San Francisco-based investment management firm. His experiences conducting deep research and impactful analysis over two summers have helped him to better define and pursue his professional ambitions.
True to his internship experiences, Yash is pursuing a field in consulting or financial services, where he hopes to apply his people skills and quantitative analysis abilities from industrial engineering to find strategic solutions to any kind of problem. While he’ll likely still be home in Dubai this spring, Yash welcomes anyone who’d like to talk about IEOR, consulting, Premier League Football, or anything else to reach out to him at yashbhandari@berkeley.edu.
