Graduate of CPS: Hritik Kabra
Master of Professional Studies in Analytics ’26
First-Generation Student
Three words to describe your experience at Northeastern:
Arrived. Built. Bloomed.
What motivated you to continue through challenging times in obtaining your degree?
Honestly — the people who believed in me before I believed in myself. When my laptop broke in my first weeks and I had nothing, the Boston Public Library lent me one. When naysayers told me I was too junior to lead, a professor backed me anyway. When I doubted whether I belonged in a new country, a mentor showed me around Boston like I had always been here. I could not quit — not because of the degree, but because quitting would mean letting down every person who had bet on me. My grandmother’s verse from the Bhagavad Gita kept me grounded: do your duty, do not worry about the outcome. So I kept showing up. And every time I did, someone was there reminding me why it mattered.
What has your journey revealed to you about yourself?
Northeastern revealed to me that I was never the person who needed a blueprint — I was the person meant to build one. I arrived thinking success meant achieving things for myself. I leave knowing it means creating conditions for others to achieve theirs. Every role I took on, every student I mentored, every Saturday morning I volunteered — they taught me that my greatest strength is not my analytical mind but my instinct to show up for people. Northeastern did not give me confidence. It showed me I already had it — I just needed a community brave enough to let me use it.
Experiential learning is a core component of a Northeastern education. Describe some of the highlights for you.
My experiential learning did not happen in one place — it happened everywhere, simultaneously. In Dr. Bahrami’s Intermediate Analytics course, I completed a project with Intelmatix that taught me how classroom concepts solve real business problems. That project directly prepared me for my co-op at Web Industries, where I built analytics infrastructure from scratch for a hundred million dollars in annual inventory at a company that was one-hundred-percent employee-owned. The theory became tools. The tools became impact. But experiential learning at Northeastern was never just about co-ops. It was mentoring sixteen thousand students and learning that leadership is listening. It was facilitating Voices for Social Change and discovering that the hardest conversations teach you the most. It was judging middle school debates on Saturday mornings and realizing that helping a fifteen-year-old find her voice teaches you more about communication than any textbook. Northeastern promised that learning would not stop at the classroom door. It kept that promise — and then some.
Every role I took on, every student I mentored, every Saturday morning I volunteered — they taught me that my greatest strength is not my analytical mind but my instinct to show up for people. Northeastern did not give me confidence. It showed me I already had it — I just needed a community brave enough to let me use it.
Hritik Kabra
Is there anything else you wanted to say that we didn’t cover?
Just this: I am a first-generation student who arrived with a suitcase and a broken laptop. I leave with a degree, a community, and the knowledge that I was never alone — even when I thought I was. Every person who helped me along the way — professors, mentors, librarians, co-op managers, fellow students, volunteer coordinators — they are graduating with me. This degree has my name on it, but it belongs to all of them too. Thank you, CPS, for proving that where you start does not determine where you end up.
