Alumni Spotlight - Amy Krishnamohan (MSSM '14)

Discover Your Passion to Build a Career

Amy Krishnamohan (MSSM ’14) had a passion for software and worked as a developer/product manager at SAP. Although she enjoyed being involved in product development, she wanted to interact more closely with customers and help to explain why certain products were the right ones for their needs. She was fascinated by the marketing process, from interacting with clients, pitching products, and developing the optimal messaging to positioning a product in the market where it would draw the most interest. Following this fascination, Amy decided to pursue the Master of Science in Software Management at Carnegie Mellon University’s Silicon Valley campus so she could hone her marketing and management skills.

The Integrated Innovation Experience

As a part time student in the program, Amy’s interest in agile marketing and hands-on product development continued to grow. "Having the experience of building a product from the ground up really exposed me to a world of customer-facing product development and marketing that I was passionate about pursuing,” Krishnamohan explains. In her Real World Software Engineering course, she and her team "CourseGrain" were nominated as the first team by venture capitalist panels to have developed a project that they would want to fund.

Along with her passion for technology, she was particularly interested in Big Data. Amy investigated many different companies and liked what she found at Teradata. "Their tag line caught my attention; When the world gets smaller, data gets bigger; I was especially interested in big data analytics where you need to utilize various technology to get the insight from complex data (structured and unstructured)."

During her time at CMU, she received various advice on her career and industry trends from professors and teammates. "Being surrounded by passionate and smart people in the software field, I began to realize that the network I was building was one of the most valuable assets in my career. The networks and bonds you form at CMU are a life-long benefit," offers Krishnamohan.