Calendarise It! Muskaan’s Path to Planned Success
Armed with sticky notes, Google calendar and an elaborate system of colour-coding, Muskaan excels at planning the chaos of life into order. With the schedule sorted, Muskaan feels she can give her all to absorbing knowledge. Her undergraduate degree in Psychology and Economics means that she is always curious about the world and the people that occupy it.
Ask Muskaan why she wanted to be at Vedica and she’ll say: “I missed being in the classroom.” With her experience in startups and setting up new programme areas, Muskaan sought a holistic understanding of how consultants operate in large corporations. But she also wanted to stay close to her liberal arts training.
“Professors here approach things differently. For example, I’d only ever engaged with critical thinking from a theoretical perspective. But we humanised critical thinking in a way that we could actually bring it back to life and make it a habit.”
By slipping into nuances, Muskaan is now able to ask more uncomfortable questions. She often thinks of business ethics — the difficult choices between ethics and profits — and how mindful businesses can actually learn the tricky ropes of balance. Because of courses on marketing and branding, she’s evaluating her non-preferentiality; now she digs deeper into what she is consuming and the stories behind those products.
For Muskaan, an all-women’s cohort has opened up space for candid conversations. “There’s always comfort even in uncomfortable situations. You can express fears, there’s no judgement.”
She also finds herself opening up with her parents and asking questions she never asked before.
“I’m learning a lot about the history of partition in my own family. I’m also slowly absorbing how my mother made very unconventional decisions in the 1990s. She chose to be a Chartered Accountant, a completely male-dominated profession and married only when she was settled in her career. But she was able to do it because of the support she had.”
Muskaan now sees herself working somewhere at the intersection of people, systems and impact. “I want to prioritise people at the heart of processes. That’s what I’m good at.”
