Manashi Pandit built an awe-inspiring career after completing degree in global business
Manashi Pandit, F26, began her career early in Nepal, working across an international development organization, cooperatives, a media house, and eventually a startup. Moving between various sectors gave her an early lesson that would shape her career: the problems facing businesses and developing countries rarely fit neatly into a single category.
Her experience at a startup in Nepal taught her that effective decision-making requires navigating multiple perspectives, priorities, stakeholders, and skills.
“When you're in a developing country, you often need to first create an environment that’s hospitable to innovation, and doing so, I realized, demands a wide range of skills from an individual,” Pandit said. “The role spans an unusually broad range of responsibilities: one day you're reviewing a contract and buried in the financials, the next you're negotiating with vendors, meeting with a media representative, understanding the policies that affect the business and how the country’s politics might affect you, all in service of advancing the company’s interest.”
As classmates contemplated higher education in business, Pandit’s work experience showed her she needed a more interdisciplinary education to pursue her goals. She learned about Fletcher’s Master of International Business: Quantitative Methods (MIB:QM) degree program and found a match.
“The reason I found the Fletcher degree so unique and interesting is because, when I look back at my professional experiences, none of the work was ever siloed,” Pandit said. “Every decision involved multiple stakeholders and required me to draw on different disciplines—from business and finance to policy and international affairs. Fletcher’s interdisciplinary approach reflected the way I had already learned to think: understanding a problem from multiple perspectives and bringing those perspectives together to make better decisions.”
Pivoting from Development Consulting to Finance
At Fletcher, Pandit began to understand the role of finance in global affairs. She also bolstered her understanding of global business through coursework in law, finance, and strategic management. Pandit entered Fletcher imagining she’d go into development consulting.
“Very quickly, through my coursework I started to discover the multitude of possibilities beyond development that were open to me,” she said. “Two classes that shaped my interest the most were Global Private Equity and International Financial Management. I began to understand how companies in developed markets access and deploy capital across both domestic and international markets.”
“I was fascinated to learn about the capital markets in the United States—the depth of resources available, how deeply integrated and transparent the system was, and the level of innovation within it,” she added. “Coming from Nepal, where access to capital can be much more limited, I was struck by how many different avenues businesses have to raise capital and how that shapes what they are able to achieve.”
Her growing interest in finance also coincided with another shift she was observing at Fletcher and across the broader business landscape: the growing importance of quantitative skills.
“I found the quantitative aspect of the degree to be particularly relevant to what the job market was demanding at the time,” she said. “I was fascinated by the fact that I could be taking a law class, a data science class, econometrics and international finance class at the same time. It gave me the ability to approach problems from very different perspectives and understand how those perspectives come together in the real world.”
A Global Business Degree Providing Real-World Training
Manashi also appreciates the hands-on experience she gained through her degree.
While at Fletcher, Pandit worked as a fellow with Mastercard and participated in the MIB mentorship program, through which she secured her first summer internship. These experiences gave her an opportunity to gain hands-on experience in the U.S. professional environment for the first time.
“Both experiences helped me tremendously because, up until that point, I had primarily been able to contextualize my learning at Fletcher in a classroom setting,” Pandit said. “Beyond the work itself, having mentors along the way who could help me navigate a new professional environment and connect what I was learning in the classroom to real-world challenges was incredibly valuable.”
Over the summer, Pandit worked as a finance intern at an Austin-based impact consulting firm. Having never worked in anything remotely close to a finance role before, she quickly discovered that she loved the work and came out of the experience certain that she wanted to build her career in finance, which led her from Fletcher right back into the workforce, preparing Pandit for her current role.
In her final semester, Pandit attended a guest lecture on campus by Daniel Ades, CEO and chief investment officer at Kawa Capital Management, a fixed income hedge fund.
After his guest lecture, she introduced herself, and the two sat in the Hall of Flags to talk about the firm and the work it did. Three weeks later, she signed her offer letter to join the firm.
Read more about Fletcher’s Master of International Business: Quantitative Methods degree program.