We are so proud of the eleven QUESTees who graduated this fall. I was able to speak with two of them, Kunal Parikh and Joy Tijani, to get their perspectives on their time in QUEST here at Maryland as well as ask them about the future.

Kunal Parikh (Cohort 36) is an Operations Management and Business Analytics major who just finished up with his capstone course this semester where he worked with D&H Distributing. He will be missed especially because he was always a friendly smiling face in the QUEST lab. In fact, he mentioned that being in the QUEST lab and the time that he spent with QUESTees was one of the highlights of his college career.

Parikh presenting at the QUEST conference

Parikh had friends freshman year who were in QUEST, and they told him all about how impactful it was for their college life. He wasn’t quite sure about what he wanted to do when he walked in the door as a freshman, but he knew that QUEST would give him the skillset to succeed in college and afterwards. He wasn’t wrong either. Parikh will be working at Capital One after he graduates as an Associate Product Manager. “QUEST helped me immensely because the alumni directory connected me to people who worked within product management and Capital One and gave me a good understanding of what professional opportunities I wanted to explore. Also, the alumni mentorship/connections were generally just really helpful as I was recruiting,” he said.

Joy Tijani

Joy Tijani (Cohort 35) is a Computer Science major. Originally, she was also thinking about also majoring in business. That was when she found QUEST. One of her personal mentors told her about the program and encouraged her to apply and the rest is history. Tijani told me that her favorite memory in QUEST was the conference. Her team won the best capstone, and therefore got to present to everyone at the conference. She was really nervous the entire presentation about making a mistake and wasn’t focused on anything else. Her team did flawlessly and just as they were returning to their seats, it was announced that their team had won best poster as well. It was a perfect way to end her time in QUEST.

After graduation, Tijani will be working at Bloomberg as a software engineer. She said that her time in QUEST helped her ace her interview and be comfortable networking with full-time professionals. Tijani mentioned she knows she is ready to enter the workforce because QUEST gave her all the tools she needs to be successful. Down the road, she plans on potentially creating her own start-up from the ground up. Using the entrepreneurial mindset that her peers have helped prepare her with, she is excited about what is to come.

We are so excited to see what these graduates and all our other new alumni will do as they enter the working world. We know that whatever they do, they will be successful, and they will represent the QUEST program well.