When I was twenty-two, I had an engineering degree I didn't want and a gut feeling I couldn't yet articulate.
Electrical engineering was what a smart kid from India was supposed to study. So I studied it. I did well enough. But something wasn't right — not in a dramatic, throw-your-textbooks-in-the-air way. More like wearing shoes that are a half-size too small. You can walk. You can even run. But you know, somewhere deep, that this isn't how it's supposed to feel.
So I did something that felt reckless at the time. I pivoted. I got an MBA in Organizational Development and Change Management. I spent three years helping organizations through transformations. Then I moved to the United States — alone, starting over — and earned a Master's in International Business. Then another in Marketing Analytics. Along the way, I worked in digital marketing in LA, took on strategic planning at Emerson Electric in Minnesota, and eventually landed where I am now: Strategy Manager for Retail Operations at Ulta Beauty.
If you looked at my resume in 2015, you would not have predicted beauty retail. Frankly, neither would I.
But here's what I've learned: every single one of those "detours" was actually building something. I just couldn't see the architecture yet.
The Path Nobody Suggested
When I think about the career advice I got early on — from professors, mentors, well-meaning relatives — nobody ever said, "You should go into operations." Nobody said, "Go work in strategic planning at a manufacturing company. Then go do retail." The suggestions were more conventional: stay in your lane, build depth in one area, find your niche and own it.
But I kept being drawn to the messy middle of organizations — the places where strategy met execution, where the plan on the slide had to survive contact with real people doing real work. That's operations. It's not the flashiest part of any business. It doesn't get the keynote slot at conferences. But it's where you learn how things actually work.
Looking back, every role I've held has been some version of the same question: how do you make a plan work in practice, not just in theory? Change management was that question applied to organizational transformations. Strategic planning at Emerson was that question applied to global sales and North America strategy. Retail operations at Ulta is that question applied to stores, customers, and associates every single day.
Nobody offered me this path. I found it myself, through a series of choices that looked messy from the outside but made perfect sense from the inside.
What Change Management Actually Taught Me
My first real career was in change management — helping organizations in India navigate transformations. It wasn't glamorous. It wasn't a title people envied. But it taught me something that has shaped every role since: the hardest part of any transformation isn't the strategy. It's the people.
You can have the best plan in the world. The most elegant process redesign. The most sophisticated technology implementation. If the people in the system don't understand why things are changing, don't trust the people leading the change, and don't see themselves in the future you're building — the plan dies.
I didn't know it at the time, but that lesson would become the foundation of everything.
What a Global Manufacturer Taught Me
At Emerson Electric, I worked in strategic planning — first on process improvement for Global Sales, then on North America strategy. This was industrial manufacturing at a massive scale. Global supply chains. Cross-continental coordination. Decisions that affected thousands of people across dozens of facilities.
What surprised me was how much it felt like change management. Different vocabulary. Same human dynamics. Trying to get people across functions to collaborate; or translate corporate strategy into something that made sense on the ground; or even managing the tension between what the spreadsheet said was optimal and what the humans in the system needed to feel was fair.
I learned to think in systems — not just processes. I learned that strategy without execution is fiction. And I learned that cross-functional thinking isn't a buzzword — it's the difference between a plan that works on a slide and a plan that works in reality.
What Beauty Retail Is Teaching Me
When I moved to Ulta Beauty, people were surprised. "From industrial manufacturing to beauty?" They said it like I'd changed species.
But here's what I found: the operational challenges are remarkably similar. Staffing models, inventory strategy, store execution, customer experience, supply chain management— these are universal problems wearing different clothes. The beauty industry adds its own complexity — service-driven retail, rapidly shifting consumer trends, the wellness crossover that's turning beauty into a healthcare-adjacent category — but the underlying operational principles translate.
What Ulta has given me is deep immersion in the consumer. In retail operations, you see the full chain — from the supply chain to the shelf to the human being standing at the counter trying to figure out which moisturizer is right for the customer. You see how operational decisions ripple through to customer experience and associate experience simultaneously.
Operations should drive value for three masters, not one. The business, yes. But also the customer. And — this one often gets forgotten — the people doing the work.
What the "Detours" Were Actually Building
Here's what I wish someone had told me ten years ago: the unconventional path is actually the strategic one. You just can't see it until you're far enough along to look back.
Change management taught me to see the people inside any system. Emerson taught me to think at scale — across continents, across functions, across competing priorities. Digital marketing taught me to think like a customer. Marketing analytics taught me to trust the data but question what it's really saying. And Ulta is teaching me what happens when you put all of those lenses together and point them at one business.
None of that was planned. But all of it compounds.
The skills that turned out to matter most aren't the ones I studied for — they're the ones I picked up by being the outsider learning fast. Empathy, because you need it when you walk into an organization you don't fully understand yet. Resilience, because starting over gets tiring and you do it anyway. Cross-functional thinking, because when you've worked across industries and functions, you stop seeing silos and start seeing connections.
These aren't things you learn in a program. They're things you build by taking the winding path. By saying yes to roles that don't fit neatly on a career ladder. By being willing to feel like a beginner again, and again, and again.
What I'd Tell My Twenty-Two-Year-Old Self
I'd tell her the shoes don't fit because they're not supposed to. Not because something is wrong with your feet.
I'd tell her that the path from electrical engineering to change management to international business to marketing analytics to industrial strategy to beauty retail isn't scattered. It's cumulative. Every piece adds to the toolkit. Every "detour" teaches you to see the same problem from a different angle. And that ability — to see a supply chain challenge and a customer experience challenge and a people challenge as three facets of the same thing — is the rarest and most valuable skill in any organization.
I'd tell her that nobody is going to offer you the operations path. You're going to have to choose it yourself. And when people look confused by your choices, that's not a sign you're doing it wrong. It's a sign you're doing something they haven't seen before.
I'd tell her that the future isn't about fitting into someone else's model of what a career should look like. It's about expanding what's possible.
And I'd tell her to start writing about it sooner. Because there's a difference between having expertise and having expertise that other people know about. Sharing what you've learned isn't self-promotion — it's generosity. And it opens doors you didn't know existed.
Your Turn
If you're reading this and your career path looks "messy" — if you've crossed industries, changed functions, pivoted more than once — I want you to consider the possibility that you haven't been drifting. You've been building something that doesn't have a name yet.
The operations path. The strategy path. The cross-functional, cross-industry, cross-cultural path. It's not the one they'll suggest in a career planning workshop. But it might be the one that teaches you the most, connects the most dots, and positions you to make the kind of impact that actually changes things.
Nobody offered me this path. So far it has turned out to be the best one I could have taken.