In August 2025, Neha Jain boarded a plane with only two bags for a one-way flight to Atlanta. Her move was a big deal, geographically and culturally. She left behind family and familiar landscapes, swapping banyans and pipals for magnolias and peach trees.
With nearly a decade of professional experience across banking, healthcare, and energy at companies including Standard Chartered Bank, Cardinal Health, and ExxonMobil, she was ready to make a bold move. So she enrolled in the M.S. in Finance program at Georgia State’s Robinson College of Business.
"I wanted to deepen my financial knowledge, strengthen my analytical capabilities, and expand my understanding of the U.S. business environment," she said.
Jain's interest in finance took shape at Christ University in Bangalore, where she earned her bachelor of commerce in finance and accounting in 2016. Through an internship as a valuation analyst with Grant Thornton, she learned "how much financial decisions depend on the quality of the data behind them.”
Her perspective gradually shifted from interpreting financial results to examining the systems that produce them. Jain had a lot of questions: Who owns the data? Can an organization trust it? And what happens when the information guiding a major initiative is wrong?
Now, Jain is adding the AI layer to that conversation. As organizations adopt machine learning faster than governance can keep up, she sees a growing need for leaders who understand both business potential and risk. Jain’s goal is to help organizations be accountable and leverage AI responsibly.
"An AI model can generate an answer quickly, but speed alone does not make that answer accurate, fair, explainable, or appropriate to use," she said.
Through a graduate assistantship in Robinson’s Department of Finance, Jain has been able to offset the cost of tuition, focus on her studies, and be active on campus. She is a founding member of the Finance Growth Network, a student organization that exposes graduate students to hands-on activities like valuation discussions and portfolio competitions as well as soft skill development opportunities. She also serves as co-director of the Society for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion in Business, another student organization that facilitates important conversations through affinity groups and speaker series.
Jain participated in Panthers on Wall Street, an intense immersion program that culminates in a 3-day trip to New York City’s Financial District. During the excursion, she networked with employers and visited major industry firms. The experience provided exposure to American business culture and laid the groundwork for new professional relationships.
Jain graduates next month and plans to pursue leadership roles in business strategy, data governance, and responsible AI. She wants to build programs that satisfy compliance requirements and support organizations to make smart, secure decisions so they can innovate at scale, safely.
Her master’s in finance is getting her closer to that goal, and she has learned to trust the process.
"Reinvention does not mean starting from zero," she said. "It means taking everything you have learned, having the courage to build on it, and being open to possibilities you may not have considered before."