Sergio Espinoza Torres
Rice University
Houston (29.7° N, 95.3° W)

featuring Shaurya Agarwal, Product Manager, Aptiv Autonomous Mobility (formerly nuTonomy), Boston (42.3° N, 71.0° W)

As college students, it is quite difficult to envision ourselves in our careers five to 10 years from now. Thankfully, I was granted the opportunity to interview Shaurya Agarwal, a mechanical engineering Rice alumnus, and learn about his career endeavors. Shaurya Agarwal graduated from Rice in 2014 with a BS in mechanical engineering and now works for Aptiv Autonomous Mobility (formerly nuTonomy) building software to power self-driving cars. Before he worked at nuTonomy, however, he made many career-defining decisions, and my interview with him revealed how one can build a dream career out of trying new things.

In his time as an undergraduate at Rice, Shaurya learned that he wanted to hone the soft skills that engineering did not provide, and he did so by seeking out leadership positions in engineering organizations like Engineers Without Borders (EWB). He also progressively worked toward improving his leadership skills by first becoming a new student representative (NSR) and then a senator in the Rice Student Association. When asked what advice he would give to undergraduates, he recommended that they “join the engineering team that is actually applying engineering and building things, but also do something that is out of your comfort zone and is entirely soft skill related,” because the successful engineers he has met are proficient at engineering and soft skills.

Shaurya continued practicing his soft skills during his work experience, first while interning at ExxonMobil, both within marketing and as a project engineer. The oil and gas industry did not fit his interests at the time, however. He heard about consulting from his friends that interned at consulting firms, and it caught his attention, so he decided to join Bain & Company after graduation. At Bain, he discovered that there were three skills he wanted to improve on during his consulting experience—good teamwork skills, crisp analysis, and good client relationships. He emphasized how hard it was to adjust to Bain’s fast-paced environment, and the need to develop new skills, but also how formative their mentorship program is, saying “it’s the supporting structure that’s like a safety net that catches you.”

Although his experience at Bain was positive, he was seeking to learn more entrepreneurial skills, so he pursued his MBA at MIT; he hoped it would teach him how to build a business and also give him a way to reset his career. During his MBA, he felt that the position of product manager would be a great fit for him due to his interest in product innovation, so he worked for CISCO for a summer, but it was not the right fit for him at that time.

After thinking about what emerging technologies he was most interested in, Shaurya found a career in the autonomous vehicle (AV) industry. Besides its potential success in the tech sector, Shaurya was also amazed by self-driving cars. While he was doing his MBA at MIT, he found his way into the MIT student-run self-driving car team, which he said “is the only reason why I got my foot in the door of the AV industry.” After his experience on the MIT self-driving car team, he made his way into the self-driving industry by contacting alumni through LinkedIn messaging and finally ended up choosing nuTonomy. Regarding his current position, he said, “I ended up choosing this one because it was early in my career in this industry…I’d want the company that offers me the most opportunity for learning, and then later on I can think about what else I want to do,” which says a lot about his mindset and his focus on continual learning. Although he found comfort in the self-driving industry, he is still learning, and he might change his career path again in the future.

Toward the end of our discussion, Shaurya highlighted how hard it is to isolate yourself from other disciplines you might not have studied before. He said, “every product is a mix of mechanical, electrical, and computer science, basically.” According to him, it is quite difficult to work with coworkers from different specializations without having some knowledge of what they are doing, his case being software and electrical engineering, because “no product today is in a silo.”

Shaurya’s path to where he is now is testament of how important it is to not avoid switching lanes and experiencing new things. Going from ExxonMobile to Bain to MIT to nuTonomy, Shaurya found new experiences and a chance to rejuvenate his career by branching out and having a taste of different career paths. He advised aspiring engineers to contact alumni and really try to find out what they do specifically on a day-to-day basis. Of course, it is difficult to know exactly what you want to do; you could not learn about all the possible career paths you could take in our lifetime, let alone experience all of them. However, facing and accepting your current situation and making the choice that most interests you at that instance can, at the very least, expose you to a lot more than you could imagine.

Highlights from the interview:

For freshmen and sophomores in college, it’s sometimes hard to know what to major in, let alone what we’re going into once we leave college. So I want to talk about your path to where you are right now—starting with your background before Rice, why you chose mechanical engineering, your experience at Rice, why you took an interest in Exxon and then went into consulting…basically, a short background of who you are and what you do.

I chose Rice I think because I knew I wanted to do engineering. Honestly, I didn’t have a strong reason for it. Growing up as an Indian, I saw my choices as either being a doctor or an engineer, and I knew I didn’t want to be a doctor. I was good at math, and I chose engineering. I only applied to engineering schools. I remember I felt really unknowledgeable about the different types of engineering. I’m from Alabama, and the education there is…okay; it’s not the best in the country, and I hadn’t been exposed to much more than just the building blocks—physics, chemistry, et cetera. I wasn’t exposed much to different types of engineering, and so when I got to college I had no idea what something like bioengineering was…I think mechanical and electrical are really the only two that I knew what they were.

I chose mechanical engineering because it felt the most familiar. So I started on that path, and the first year was fine. I became an NSR [New Student Representative], and I joined EWB [Engineers Without Borders]. I always tried to do one engineering activity and one just pure leadership activity. Those two positions, especially the NSR, really brought out this new side of me, and something I really liked—the initiatives and just getting things done and being a leader in that standpoint, coming up with improvement ideas and then executing on them. That, I would say, was the central theme throughout my time at Rice. I felt like I was doing a second major in extracurriculars, because I kept increasing my load on that side every year. In sophomore year, I became a senator. Junior year, I became RPC Vice President and project leader for EWB. And then senior year, I became vice president for all of the EWB. Basically, my path through Rice was I realized that I liked the soft skills side a lot more. I liked the problem-solving but in the less structured manner than engineering offered. I liked the social component a lot more, so I liked problem-solving with other people and bringing people together.

Exxon internship was a phenomenal internship. I was super happy with my first real professional experience. In my interviews for Exxon, I remember specifically telling them I was interested in combining engineering with the business side. And so, that internship there, Exxon had this policy that they hired engineers for everything, so they put me in the marketing organization but as an engineer, which is interesting…was just a very different skill set. Through conversations with some mentors, they recommended that I move from downstream to upstream, and so I requested a switch—I got a return offer, but then I requested an internal switch to the production side. I got this position called project engineer, which is very much an engineer who wants to be more of a project manager. Still looks like technical work is being done, but more from an overseeing standpoint, not from that nitty-gritty executing standpoint. I really liked that internship…but I realized I didn’t like the oil industry.

Just happenchance, a couple of my friends who’d been consulting that summer, I heard what they were doing, and how much of a learning experience it was, how fast-paced it was. I didn’t know what I wanted to do after I came out of Exxon…so I went into consulting because of that, purely because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I thought I could continue to develop my skill side. I realized if I didn’t want to use the very hard skills of engineering, of solving equations, of being in the wheat, that I needed to develop some other piece that I thought was strong. And through all my leadership experiences at Rice, I thought that my soft skills really add something that was of value, and I decided to double down on that. So I interviewed for all the regular consulting firms and decided on Bain, mostly because of the cultural fit…one of the best decisions I’ve made.

Can you describe things that you initially noticed were different between consulting and Exxon?

Yeah, definitely. I remember my first six months at Bain, I really struggled. And part of that was because I had never been in an environment that was just so fast-paced. I mean, the pace of consulting is just blows every industry out of the water, and if you’re not used to it, then you really struggle to keep up with it…You’re in an environment with people either as smart or, more likely, smarter than you and you’re all working together towards the same goal, a well-functioning machine, but it’s a machine in the way that if one nut is loose, then the whole machine doesn’t work very well. You have a lot of pressure to make sure that you’re performing as well as all your other team members. The combination of the pressure and the speed, and, at the same time, the subject matter that I didn’t feel very confident with, was really tough six months.

And I mean the work itself was demonstrably different than in Exxon. At my second internship, my project engineer position with Exxon was a lot more… working with engineers and scheduling and costs and optimization versus consulting was like, I have one problem, and I need to solve this one problem as a team really, really quickly and be very, very crisp on the analysis…You have to juggle these political items between you and the client, and it really was a completely different set of skills. The core soft skills are useful, but…the three pillars I would say that you’re working with are…analytics, relationships between you and the client, and then synthesizing learnings…And so I struggled with that quite a lot in my first six months, and I basically had to change a lot of the way how I worked in that first year to be able to keep up with it. Engineering, I think, teaches you to be very methodical, very thoughtful—plan things out, make sure, check, recheck, double-check—and all of those things applied [to consulting], but you just have to do those at five times the speed.

Given the pace of consulting, how does that affect the culture? How do people behave with each other? How do people deal with their differences?

I think that really depends on the firm. From what I know, at least, different firms have different cultures. I’ll speak mainly for Bain. I think their team structure is very collaborative…When something is due to the company, people take that in stride. They know how to handle that and lend a helping hand. I think the company as a whole has a really good—this is the number one thing—has a really good mentorship structure. You come in, you have a person assigned to you that is currently in charge of your professional development throughout your time at the company, however many years you’re there, and you also have…three mentors that you pick yourself which…continuously check in with you and help your progress along. On top of that, you can also have longer-vision mentors, that you just choose. I would think the mentorship framework been set up really, really good, and that helped me a lot.

What did you do during your MBA?

There were three big reasons that I chose to do my MBA at the time that I did. The first was that…I didn’t have a lot of foundational business skills that I needed. Consulting is good for getting you very deep into topics, but I wouldn’t say it gives you a whole foundation, and so I wanted to build that, and it was the right time to do it.

Two, I wanted to learn how to build a company. It was something that I felt that I was really unequipped to do. If I had a billion dollar idea tomorrow, what would I do on day number one, day number two, day number three? That kind of tangible skill set, I didn’t feel like I had—that’s part of the reason I ended up choosing MIT, they were a good fit about entrepreneurship.

Then three, obviously the most important reason is that business school offers a reset. It is a unique degree where you can go in one end being anything and come out the other end being anything else. You come in as a teacher and exit as a private equity person. And I thought that it was the right time to reset my career.

And so I went in, and…I knew I wanted to go to the tech sector, so…I said I don’t know where in tech, but let me figure out what role I want to be. And so I looked across the different roles somebody would play, what their business manager and background was good for, and product manager really stuck out. It was this intersection of the two disciplines, and I knew coming out of consulting that I wanted to get a little bit closer to the engineer side, closer because that’s where I realized most of what I was excited about was happening….I wanted to try it out with an established company that knew how to do product management, versus a startup that was still trying out a lot of other things, so I chose a big tech company, CISCO. I was a product manager for one of their cybersecurity products, emerging new products within their cybersecurity division. It was a great internship…I learned what all the different paths you could take, but one thing I realized was that I…really did care about which product I wanted to work on, so I had to be passionate about what I was building… I said I need to find a product manager role for a technology that I really like, and after thinking a lot about it, I settled on autonomous vehicles as emerging technology I was really excited about. I thought it had a lot of potential for impact and was at a point in its development that there were a lot of next problems to solve…I joined the self-driving car team at MIT, student run, learned a lot. And obviously now I’m in that industry.

Why did you choose self-driving cars? How did you hear about the industry?

I first looked at two projects, one being an existing technology that I use a lot, something like Google or Facebook would be a good example of that, where I use their products a lot, and I could potentially get involved in that and help to improve that. The second one being emerging technologies that have a lot of potential, but I may not be using right now.

So, I decided that in this stage in my career, I wanted to work on an emerging technology because the problems were a lot harder, and it seemed more interesting to me…I actually sat down, and I made a list of every emerging technology I could think of, everything from genetics to blockchain, to self-driving cars, to augmented reality, and wrote everything down and started going through a process of ranking them. The two main things I used [as criteria to rank this list] were—what do I think is the potential for impacting humanity, and what I think were the chances of success, like of actually going to happen, like it’s actually going to come to fruition. I remember there were some things out there, like brain machine interfaces…probably a lot of impact…I’m not sure if it’s going to happen in my lifetime…

Autonomous vehicles—it was hitting a high point in both those metrics, but honestly what set me off was I was in San Francisco for the summer, because I was with CISCO, and I saw my first self-driving car…and I was like, “That’s amazing.” And I saw that I was just—I wanted to know how that was working, and it just flooded my brain with the questions, questions and excitement, so I pursued that. And so I spent the rest of the summer networking, going mostly MIT alumni in the area that were working on self-driving cars, just starting to get to know them. Honestly, I can’t thank the MIT Driverless team enough. It was very serendipitous, and there were these two students starting the team in my second year, two students from the aerodynamics and astrophysics department at MIT, and I got connected with them, in a roundabout way, and that team is really what got me…understanding what this technology was, and how it was working. That experience is the only reason why I got my foot in the door…It’s a really competitive industry, but I made sure that I had more experience than the average person. I networked my way into alumni contacts or LinkedIn messaging, things like that; they weren’t recruiting because most of them are so small, and so I just muscled my way into interviewing for all of them. Ended up picking the one I’m at right now, which is nuTonomy…ended up choosing that one because the role I was offered was the most significant for learning. I’d want the company that offers me the most opportunity for learning, and then later on I can think about what else I want to do.

In your journey from being a mechanical engineering major at Rice to where you are right now, were you forced to branch out? Or did you keep working on mechanical engineering things, like in different industries, in different areas?

I would say probably the most branching out I did was senior design at Rice, where I designed a PCB…that was probably the most branching out I’ve done. But then now, in my job right now, sure there is…mechanical piece…we’re building cars…but the majority of the company is working on software. Even when I was in CISCO, the product was cybersecurity products, the hardware box, but the majority of the innovation was all software. And so I would say…it’s becoming increasingly difficult to separate yourself from the software, and while you don’t have to be a computer science major, in itself, it’s rapidly becoming a case where if you don’t at least understand how software works, how to work with software engineers, the basic premise, there’s a lot of technologies that you won’t be able to interact with…No product today is in a silo. Every product is cross-functional, and I would say senior design is actually an underrated learning experience because it’s the first opportunity I had to work with multiple engineering disciplines in such a close-fashioned manner…if you look at the entire technology industry today, I would say that every product is a mix of mechanical, electrical, and computer science, basically.

And how did you integrate the learning that you needed to contribute in your company into your life?

I think it was a mix….I took some classes I think were specifically geared towards that. And I would say my experience through the self-driving team obviously helped with that…but I think most of it came from personal curiosity. So even when I was in Bain, I was always technophile…when a new product came out, I was really interested in it, I would start chasing down the rabbit hole—how does this work and how does this work and how does this work and what would I improve about it, and doing those exercises that I later on learned were very similar to product manager interviews…that was also an indication that I was down the right path, because these are questions and exercises I did on my own just because I was interested, not for any goal, just because I was interested.

What advice would you give undergraduate engineering students?

I think for engineers in school right now…there’s lots of advice, but I’ll limit it to helping you find the right career path. And I will say, first make sure that you spend enough time with one of the major engineering student [groups] that are actually applying what you’re learning, whether it’s Solar Car, or EWB, or Hyperloop, or anything, you know? It’s really hard to understand what you do with engineering when it’s all theoretical in class. Those teams are the first step into understanding…what does this equation mean, or how do I ever use this really complicated aerodynamics problem…how do I actually do something with this, you know, what are all those engineers out in the world building products doing?

Two…I would say all the successful engineers that I have ever met do a really good job of being both great at engineering but also great at the soft skills. I have met engineer after engineer—what’s a common theme among the really good engineers that I have met, I would say it’s combining both those things, of being able to do the engineering but also things like being able to manage your work, being able to handle really stressful situations, being able to work across teams, those types of things…And so join the engineering team but also do something that is out of your comfort zone that is entirely soft skill related…And, in general, don’t undervalue that aspect of your skill set, you know you have to be good at both.

And I would say the third thing is what you’re doing right now…I wish so badly that I had talked to more professionals while I was at Rice. If joining an engineering student team is the first step in understanding how engineering education applies, I would say the next step is getting past Rice, and exactly what you’re doing right now, very concretely asking people who had your degree, who are in different positions, what they’re doing day to day…whether or not that sounds interesting to you if you have to do it 340 days out of the year…If I were to go back and do this exercise, I would try to get people from—if you look at it from a grid—I would probably look at people from multiple different industries, and then within an industry, a couple of industries I would pick that really interest me, and go multiple different roles. And just try to understand what this degree turns into.

Interview excerpts have been lightly edited for clarity and readability and approved by the interviewee.