Chapter 05: International Study and Work after Graduation
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Description
Ms. Kaul begins this chapter with a discussion of her first job working as a consultant for the insurance company, Swiss Re. She then talks about her decision to return to school for an MBA (conferred in 2006 by New York University’s Leonard Stern School of Business) and her creation in 2004 of the independent consulting firm, Panacea.
Next, Ms. Kaul talks about the impact of her summer internship studying at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1999. She talks about family reasons for wishing to study in Israel.
[The recorder is paused.]
She notes that this international experience reinforced her native interest in big-picture thinking and its impact on real people and real processes.
Identifier
KaulR_01_20160224_C05
Publication Date
2-24-2016
Publisher
The Making Cancer History® Voices Oral History Collection, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
City
Houston, Texas
Interview Session
Topics Covered
The Interview Subject's Story - Professional Path; Professional Practice; The Professional at Work; Discovery, Creativity and Innovation; Personal Background; Educational Path
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Disciplines
History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Oncology | Oral History
Transcript
R. Kaul, MBA:
So I took a job with Ernst & Young, which I think when I was offered the job they were Ernst & Young. When I took -- when I ultimately started, they were Capgemini, Ernst & Young, and by the time I left, they were Capgemini.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
And what were you doing for them, and sort of what were some of the highlights that kind of catalyzed knowledge for you?
R. Kaul, MBA:
I was doing consulting. I spent most of my time with Ernst & Young, and engagement at a company called Swiss Re. That was maybe the third company I got assigned to.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
And that's Swiss, R-E?
R. Kaul, MBA:
Yeah.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
What did that -- is that a --
R. Kaul, MBA:
Swiss Reinsurance.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, OK.
R. Kaul, MBA:
They're the second largest reinsurance company in the world. Insurers of insurers. I say that, because when you first get assigned to these things, you don't know. So...
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
2 Hey, I had no idea. I appreciate it.
R. Kaul, MBA:
I'm supposed to be in the Life Sciences sector, and I ultimately got staffed on financial services engagements. So...
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
And that was not your bright idea? It was somebody else's bright idea?
R. Kaul, MBA:
No, I just think that's where the work was.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Right.
R. Kaul, MBA:
There was an economic downturn. You wanted to be utilized or you were going to be laid off, so you took what you could get.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Sure. But again, it sounds like that was not a bad thing to have happen.
R. Kaul, MBA:
No. So I worked on that engagement for a couple of years, started in the drudges of quality assurance, moved to being a business analyst, eventually into kind of project management. But most of the time kind of moving on the business analyst track.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
OK, so from 2001 to 2003 you were with Capgemini. But then in 2003, you moved over and you were working as an [ ] analyst for Swiss Re.
R. Kaul, MBA:
Yeah, at a certain point, I just switched jobs, you could kind of just get paid more to work for your client, than to be a consultant. And since I was -- I was sort indefinitely staffed there.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Oh, OK.
R. Kaul, MBA:
0:56:34:7 [ ] I had just gotten married, and we wanted to buy a house, and wanted the stability. It was kind of a little bit of that, too, that I thought, probably not, like, the best decision of my life. It was more opportunistic. I was just in a situation that I was indefinitely at that place, it was comfortable, I knew it, and I could be in a slightly better situation if I just joined the client.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Were there some big lessons from that period?
R. Kaul, MBA:
If I could do it again, I don't think I would go back and join the client. Not because there was anything wrong with it, it was the exact same job. But it was sort of submitting to something that wasn't me.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
In what way?
R. Kaul, MBA:
So we're working on a project called "Business of the Future." So we were redesigning and automating their business, so we were automating their quote and treaty process, their claims management process, the actuarial process, across multiple countries. So, I mean, it was a very big engagement. And being on the consultancy side, it wasn't a commitment. It was, I'm learning from an interesting engagement, I'm not committing my career to being a reinsurance person. And I got to a point where I was about to take a test, one of the certification tests to be able to be a certified reinsurance person, because I had learned so much about the business that I could pass every insurance test. When you're designing a system, you learn about the business. I'm not interested in reinsurance. And consulting at a reinsurance company to automate the business is one thing, but finding yourself that that's then your career is sort of a different wake-up call to say, wait a minute. It may have made sense for me, financial and family standpoint. But maybe it was laziness. I should have just went and found a different job. [ ]
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
But there are different assumptions when you're a consultant, versus when you're an in-house person, for sure.
R. Kaul, MBA:
Yeah. Yeah, and I think I started to feel suffocated when I became an employee. Nothing changed in my job, like I came into work the next day, and the only thing that was different was my paycheck, right? But I started to feel like, oh my God, what did I sign up for? This is my career. You know what I mean? So I went back and -- went back to school part-time. I did it in finance, because that was sort of like the gap in my education. I had only had lightweight finance.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
And this was at --
R. Kaul, MBA:
NYU.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
NYU, the Leonard Stern School of Business?
R. Kaul, MBA:
Yes. So I did that part-time while I worked, figuring I would use that as a launching point to launch my career in a different direction. Sometimes education can help do that. And what I was finding in the market at that time, as I sort of perused the job market was most people wanted you to have an MBA, my Masters of Information Systems Management wasn't recognized in the same way that the MBA is recognized. That said, I learned a lot more in my Masters of Information Systems Management.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Really?
R. Kaul, MBA:
It was a much richer education.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Interesting.
R. Kaul, MBA:
And a lot of what I learned in my MBA was duplicative, I had already taken all the management classes in Statistics and Economics and whatnot. The only thing that was different was sort of the deep financial classes, when I took the specialization in finance. So that's what I said was, in large part, duplicative.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Right. Now while you were doing your MBA, you were also on an entrepreneurial adventure. So tell me a bit about that.
R. Kaul, MBA:
Yeah, at a certain point I, I was doing my MBA. I built some relationships in my MBA, and, not much to tell on this one. I just decided to leave and just basically doindependent consulting for a while, while I finished my MBA. It gave me more flexibility, it made me feel less suffocated. [Redacted]
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
And you were located in...?
R. Kaul, MBA:
I was just, yeah, located where I was living, which happened to be in New Rochelle, New York.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
New Rochelle.
R. Kaul, MBA:
So not an interesting story there, just kind of a stint of doing some independent work while I finished up the MBA. Then at that time, so I was living in New York. I had gotten married. I was finishing the MBA. My husband and I were talking about having kids. And so my dad kind of convinced me to come back to Pittsburgh. If I'm going to have kids and a family and we're going to be a family, I should be close by.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Can I, before we embark on this, I don't want to miss asking you about the stint you did in Copenhagen in the business school.
R. Kaul, MBA:
Oh! (laughter)
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Because that looked -- and also, you had -- did something else a little earlier, 1999.
R. Kaul, MBA:
Oh, in Israel.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Yeah, in Israel. And I don't know if it's the right time to talk about the Israel thing, but...
R. Kaul, MBA:
Oh sure. No, no, I just, in both settings, always interested in in having an international experience. So when I was in college, I did a summer semester in Israel. I studied at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I transferred the credits so it was truly a summer. Truly an academic experience. I was able to transfer the credit towards my public policy.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Cool.
R. Kaul, MBA:
And I studied the conflict actually, at the time. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And we went and we visited with different leaders on both sides of the equation. We visited refugee camps and things like that to truly understand the different perspectives. And I think it was a joint program -- it was a joint program between the law school and I think psychology, kind of social sciences, type curriculum. And yeah, it was a really interesting experience.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
How long was that program?
R. Kaul, MBA:
It was just for the duration for the summer.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
So it was a three-month...
R. Kaul, MBA:
Few months. Yeah.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Wow. That's something.
R. Kaul, MBA:
[ ] I ended up in an off campus apartment, you know, and living in the heart of Jerusalem, and they had a lot of different recreational things when you weren't in school. They took you on different tours and things. We got to hike through the Golan Heights, and things like that.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Going overseas is always such a great opportunity.
R. Kaul, MBA:
Yeah. You know, I always -- I have these Jewish roots, I mean, both my parents are Jewish. And my mom, when she was dying, kind of got re-invigorated into her religion. My dad, when she died, got disillusioned. So religion was never really a part of our lives. So --
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
What about for you?
R. Kaul, MBA:
Never was a part of my life, but then I became curious. So I kind of took the opportunity to find a reason to explore deeper. When I was in high school, I took a lot of classes around philosophy and, religious viewpoints and things like that. But didn't do a lot of it in college, because I became super-engineering, and then figured I could take the opportunity as an international experience and count it towards my public policy, and go to Israel and see, sort of just testing the if I immerse myself in it, will I feel it? You can't make yourself feel what you don't feel, right? But I never was really exposed to feel or not feel, right? Because that wasn't a part of our lives. [Redacted] So I just wanted to go and see. [Redacted] (The recorder is paused.)
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
So yeah, you were saying you just picked up and went by yourself?
R. Kaul, MBA:
Yeah. I just picked up and went to Israel. I didn't go with anyone, I just decided, this is what I wanted to do. I found an academic reason to do it so that I could justify it and fund it, because they offer grants to go.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Sure. Yeah. Well, it makes a difference.
R. Kaul, MBA:
1:07:9.5 Yeah, exactly. And just, like, explored those mechanisms and figured out how I would make it happen. [ ] So I just sort of found a way to fund it and went.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
I can really see, too, how this experience helped you really refine your interest in policy. I mean, the kind of big picture, how does the big mechanism work? What are the pieces? Who are the players?
R. Kaul, MBA:
Totally. I loved that experience. It was an amazing summer. You know, both on the academic side, just having this hands-on experience of learning about this conflict, and going and listening to the different political leaders, listening to the people on the ground experiencing it. Experiencing the culture, and then also on the social side of, like, outside the classroom, just being in a different culture and visiting all these places. And I think one weekend I just spent a weekend with a family someone connected me with it I had never met, just to see what that was like, to do Shabbat with them, and it's interesting. And Israel, it's Shabbat -- everybody just opens their doors so you can go sit and do Shabbat with anybody. So you could just go.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
A real community thing.
R. Kaul, MBA:
Yeah. So it was interesting. It was just a different culture, and a different experience. So I really enjoyed it. It was a really -- it was a really -- I'm glad I did it, because it helped me just sort out for myself, like, more about who I am and what my beliefs are, and sorting those kinds of things out. And also against, like you said, solidifying my interest in the bigger picture. I think that's why I never went towards being a specific technologist, never went -- you know, I never became a real engineer or a real computer scientist, because it's not the technology that interests me. It's always -- my interests is always in the bigger impact. You know? Whether it be technology or not technology, my interest always lies in how people are being affected by whatever we’re talking about and how the different, you know, the different impacts on society and the way that that evolves.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Very cool. I’m just having a look at my watch and I’m realizing we’re almost at 3:30 and I don’t want to cut into your -- you have transit time, don’t you, to another meeting I think?
R. Kaul, MBA:
I think that got canceled.
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Did it get canceled? (laughter) Well, I should -- I actually have transit time to something, so I should probably be winding up right now. But we have another session scheduled, so this sounds like --
R. Kaul, MBA:
Did you want me to touch on Copenhagen real quick in that same sentence?
T. A. Rosolowski, PhD:
Why don’t we -- I’d like to make sure we have enough time to really talk about that if you don’t mind, so why don’t we reserve that until next time. So I’ll just say for the record, thank you very much. I’m enjoying our conversation and I am turning off the recorder at about 28 minutes after
Recommended Citation
Kaul, Rebecca MBA and Rosolowski, Tacey A. PhD, "Chapter 05: International Study and Work after Graduation" (2016). Interview Chapters. 1264.
https://openworks.mdanderson.org/mchv_interviewchapters/1264
Conditions Governing Access
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