A Day in the Life: Radhika Vy ’25
We followed second-year MBA student Radhika Vy as she went to class, ventured to campus food trucks, and planned the annual SOM musical. Photos by Tony Rinaldo.
10:10 a.m.
When I have my Strategic Market Management course in the morning, I usually get up around 8:30 a.m., make a smoothie, and head to Evans Hall. That day we had a guest speaker: Boudhayan Sen ’12, an SOM alum who now works at McKinsey as an expert associate partner. He talked about quantitative tools we can apply to the marketing space, which is so relevant to my post-graduation work—I was a brand management intern at Proctor & Gamble over the summer and am very excited to return there full-time.
After class, the speaker had lunch and chatted one-on-one with some of the students. Especially when speakers are Yale alums, they always have a lot of advice to share and they’re very willing to get to know us.
11:30 a.m.
I had lunch plans with some friends, so I went to meet them at McNay Café. The first to arrive was one of my closest friends at SOM, Sibani Malhotra. She was in my cohort last year and is a great social connector; she’s pulled together a squad of international students who are Indian, and we do a lot of social activities together, whether it’s celebrating Diwali or just hanging out. I’m half Indian and half Vietnamese, and I’ve been able to explore my connection to Indian culture through this friend group.
11:45 a.m.
Our friends Aditya Gupta, Natasha Quamily, Jivika Mangwani, and Daksh Bhardwaj joined us, and we walked a few blocks to the food trucks. The food trucks are by the hockey rink, where I practice every week with the SOM Hockey Club. Last year I was truly a beginner, but this year I’m on the intermediate team and can get through a whole game.
The food trucks offer food from Ethiopian, Moroccan, Thai, and so many other cuisines. I knew I was going to be studying a lot later that day, and I wanted a fun lunch, so I went for spicy udon noodles. We brought our food to the picnic tables nearby, where a lot of Yale undergrads, staff members, and other grad students come to eat lunch. I love that it’s such a hub for people across the Yale community, and there’s great people-watching.
1:00 p.m.
After lunch, I went back to Evans to do research for my International Real Estate final project. I had to decide how to allocate a certain amount of money across a real estate investment portfolio, first as an individual investor and then as a corporation. It was a tough final project, but I learned a lot from it.
These high-top tables on the fourth floor of Evans are one of my favorite places to study. I feel like I’m working in a café with floor-to-ceiling windows, and I get a great view of the back lawn. During exam time, it’s a big hot spot for people studying.
2:30 p.m.
In the spring semester, I’ll be one of the directors of the Business and Society Musical. This is one of my favorite SOM traditions, where students adapt a musical and set it in a business school environment. One year, the show was based on High School Musical, and it starred a consultant and a person from the nonprofit career track who fall in love. It’s very nostalgic, especially for the second-years, because the storyline encompasses the whole MBA journey, from orientation to recruiting to graduation.
My co-director, Mauranda Men, is in charge of the music. That day, we were talking through ideas for different songs and storylines for this year’s musical. We’re thinking about basing the story on The Hunger Games. I love that the SOM community has a lot of outlets for creativity. I’m also a member of the Arts and Culture club, and last year I was in a writing circle. It’s been wonderful to connect with creative people even within a business school environment.
3:00 p.m.
Because the weather was so nice, I decided to do the rest of my studying in front of Sterling Library. I live in downtown New Haven, so when I’m walking home from class it’s easy to detour through this quad. I had a Marketing Strategy exam the next day, so I spent some time looking at cases and taking notes on my iPad.
4:10 p.m.
My second class of the day was International Real Estate with Professor Kevin Gray. He’s an SOM alum and knows everything about the real estate industry. I came into this course with no background in the industry and a sense that real estate was tedious and cumbersome. But it’s actually about understanding the macro-level socioeconomic trends in a given country, or the geography of a city, and using those factors to build a portfolio. It’s been my favorite class this quarter, and I now feel much more fluent in the language of real estate.
