Welcome to The Social Impact Podcast, brought to you by the Loeb Center at Amherst College and hosted by Ella Simons ’26!
In each episode, I sit down with a student or alum to explore their personal career journeys, the choices that have shaped them, and the insights they’ve gained along the way. Whether you’re curious about purposeful work or looking for inspiration in your own path, tune in for fresh perspectives and meaningful conversations. This is the last episode in the Social Impact series, and it has been a pleasure to learn from our wonderful and accomplished students and alumni!
The transcription below has been edited for clarity.
Ella:
Hi there, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Social Impact Podcast from the Loeb Center. I’m your host, Ella Simons, and today I’m talking to Dhyey Mavani, a senior here at Amherst College who’s already made a name for himself in the STEM world, both here at Amherst and beyond. So sit back, relax and enjoy the conversation. Hi!
Dhyey:
Hi.
Ella:
So can you briefly introduce yourself to our listeners?
Dhyey:
100%. Hello, everyone! I’m Dhyey. I’m a senior at Amherst College majoring in computer science, math and statistics. Finally done with my thesis in math and stats, and I’ve interned at a couple of tech companies before, and looking forward to joining one full time.
Ella:
Cool, cool. So I have kind of a funny story. I had heard your name before I met you actually, because you were known as a person who’d somehow developed a strategy to make yourself appear at the top of the Google results when you search “Amherst College.” Which leads to my first question: how did you develop these strategies for SEO, which is search engine optimization, and getting yourself noticed as a liberal arts student, when applying to these highly competitive STEM jobs, going up against top STEM institutions like Carnegie Mellon, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, coming from a kind of small liberal arts school?
Dhyey:
Happy to talk about that. So I wouldn’t say, a lot of it was my own creation, but it was kind of a blend of the things I learned from other people I talked to, mostly from alumni of Amherst College currently in these positions, and also people from the STEM universities, and how they develop a personalized online presence. First of all, I was confused, like, why do we even need that, right? But then I realized quickly that a lot of the opportunities that are not even posted on the platforms like LinkedIn or on the job portals, and they are available to you when the recruiters reach out to you on LinkedIn or like through email. So that kind of presence and those kinds of opportunities really pulled me towards optimizing my SEO, which is again, doing the search engine optimization for my presence, online presence, which started with a personal website. I made a bare bones personal website in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and that contained all my previous work experiences and the like, and some projects that I did, and then I started posting a lot more on like LinkedIn, which really helped me, because I saw a lot more reach outs on my LinkedIn inbox and email inboxes after doing those posts. Initially when I started out, I didn’t know a lot, right? So I just posted about the projects I did before, and what I learned through them, and apparently that really helped me, from the story you mentioned. I think that happened because of a combination of a bunch of these factors. And there are certain keywords that you can link to your website. For instance, if you worked at a certain company, you should link the website of that company in your LinkedIn profile and your personal website. And that does really help your score overall in terms of like you popping up on top. And I just associated myself a lot with Amherst College, because, again, Amherst has been really generous and given me a lot of opportunities. So I was really deliberate about writing that up. And then suddenly, somehow, Google decided to just, like, put me when someone searches Amherst College.
Ella:
Oh, wow. So that was Google’s decision.
Dhyey:
Yeah, yeah.
Ella:
Interesting. I know the STEM job market is very competitive right now. Can you go into a little bit how you go about finding internships, because I know you have a lot of experience in positions that are very rare for a liberal arts student. So can you go a little into that?
Dhyey:
100%. I’ll start off with just saying, like a lot of my positions that I have had, started with an alumni interaction. Alumni of Amherst College, again, are really helpful. So before even the recruiting season started, I started talking to people in the alumni cohort of various classes of Amherst College. And that really helped me kind of learn more about the internals of how the industry works, how recruiting works. What are the opportunities, like internships or mentorship programs, even, and these big companies, especially in 2021 when the market was kind of booming in tech. So that was a good position, and I was able to talk to them, kind of develop relationships, keep in touch with them, and then once it came the time to apply, I reached back out to them for a formal referral. And that really helped me, I think, because I have had developed, like this nice relationship with them, and I learned a lot, and then that way, I could showcase and they could also showcase, a connection and an interest in the company, working at the company, so that, I think, really helps you stand out from the bigger applicant pool that these like companies do face on a day to day basis. And I think each liberal arts student also brings their own spin to it, and you’re just not trained for the technical stuff, but you also know a lot more than that. You know how to lead with your soft skills, and I think if you play to that in your conversations with anyone at the company or even during the interviews, and also mentioned some of the experiences you gained that are like unique to you in your resume, probably in skills and interest sections, that does correlate to a higher reach back out rate. One more thing that really helped me is that I was really pedantic about the details of my resume. For instance, there are a lot of the times in these industries, especially tech and finance, ATS, like applicant tracking systems, that resume trackers that look through your resume before even, like a human eye looks through it. So in that case, I optimize for having those keywords. And for instance, if I learned Python, I’ll mention my skill level at it, and then also mention the libraries that I’ve used so far. So that definitely helps in making sure your technical score of the resume, so to speak, everyone does it differently, but vaguely speaking, that its high enough, and then looking through the job description, making sure the keywords that are in the job description are in my resume, if I relate to them, and if I have experiences related to them, that tuning is really helpful. And again, application timeline–just trying to apply as soon as possible. I had a couple of trackers developed by universities like University of Pittsburgh–there’s a PITT CSC GitHub repo that gets updated automatically. When a new job is posted, I get a notification and I quickly just send in my application. And because, again, in the first 24 hours itself, there are a lot of applications, and there are only very limited positions. So again, everything is almost on a rolling basis, unless they say so. So I think that strategy really helped me just keeping on top and then having all my artifacts ready beforehand.
Ella:
Yeah, wow. So jumping on things really quickly and, as you mentioned, soft skills. So what do you think are the soft skills that are most important to employers right now?
Dhyey:
Yeah, I think right now in the world we are in especially, I’ll talk from the tech and finance side, especially executional leadership. Just leading by example is really helpful, because there’s a lot of stuff to do. But if you are the one who does stuff actually like end to end, then you can easily motivate a team of people, especially when you are earlier in your career. You don’t have the leverage or experience to just lead teams the other way, when you’re influencing the vision or direction, but if you just execute a lot faster, then people will have the belief in you and will give you harder projects. So that’s what I’ve felt during my experiences at these big tech companies. Some other things that you gain from liberal arts education is communication skills. I think that’s really helpful, because there are people from different sorts of backgrounds coming into a workplace, and if you can convey your idea to them properly, or like, at least persuade them towards a certain direction, that will give you some runtime to test your hypotheses out, because it’s all about testing your hypothesis and checking if it’s correct. And no one knows before, and especially you don’t know beforehand, because you don’t have much experience starting out. But then, if you talk to a lot of these senior leaders, like vice presidents and all, I got to talk to the CEO during my LinkedIn internship, because I just reached out to him after an intern event. So, like, those kinds of things. I don’t think a lot of STEM school people do that, but then I think we’re taught here at liberal arts college that you should just take the steps and take a leap of faith in your beliefs and try to pursue these kinds of opportunities. So that did really help me. And again, like prioritization, just juggling multiple things at the same time and figuring out what is the top priority right now and what I should delegate. That’s really important at a place like Amherst College, I wouldn’t say generally liberal arts, but at a place like Amherst College, you have a lot of opportunities available to you. And if you try to make the most out of it, you will be overwhelmed. And that’s a good thing, because then you are forced to prioritize and figure out what things I can delegate and what things I can do at the moment in time to improve my skills in certain directions, right? So that skill, like time management plus prioritization, that’s really important.
Ella:
Yeah, and the nice thing about those soft skills is that you can always improve them. And it’s not something that’s necessarily static. You can always move forward and improve it.
Dhyey:
There’s infinite room for improvement.
Ella:
Yeah, that’s encouraging. So I know that you work with the venture acceleration firm here at Amherst, i2i. Can you briefly explain what you do there and what the company is?
Dhyey:
Yeah, 100%. So we are now registered as a student organization, RSO, and we are Ideas to Innovation, or i2i–that’s where the name came from. And during my experiences at LinkedIn, we started the i2i organization during, I think, June, and then I was leading the engineering department as the head of engineering. And we grew from like five people to now 25 people. Our goal is very simple, just to bring ideas on campus to reality, be it ideas to improve student life, to improve access of information, and even pursue projects on the sustainability front. So also partnering with the Sustainability Office or AI and Liberal Arts organizations, which are pretty established on campus, to conduct hackathons, startup labs and the like. So that is our simple goal. And as the head of engineering, I generally focused on leading multiple projects at the same time again, leveraging my prioritization skills and technical ability that I gained from my experiences so far, and making sure the students here, the next generation, are getting a better industry standard kind of engineering overview than what I got. Because when I came here, there was nothing like that, and I had to just pick stuff up on my own. My first experience was at Amazon. So I just wanted to make sure people have a better starting point or launch pad than I had back then. So that was one of the main goals. And we insist on industry standard practices like unit testing, making software accessible and then having documentation so that we just don’t make something cool, but we make it to last.
Ella:
Yeah, wow. That’s very interesting. So you mentioned the humanities and AI. What was the organization you mentioned? The thing about AI in liberal arts, yeah, what is, what is that?
Dhyey:
Yes. So there is this organization started by Professor Lee Spector, in the CS department, called AI and Liberal Arts. I think he got funding from alumni and partly from college. I don’t remember exactly, but I worked for AI in Liberal Arts during my sophomore year, if I remember correctly, and it was a great experience. What they do is they try to bring AI, as the name says, to liberal arts, which means there are events, there are discussion panels, there are hackathons brought into Amherst campus and then the nearby college campuses, again, the liberal arts colleges and we have speakers too, that enlighten us in various diverse applications of AI in like music, for instance, writing, and also like deep tech applications, too, for biology and also, just like developing AI further, just for the sake of it, right? Like that, we’re just making it better, right? So all those things come together, and AI and Liberal Arts serves as a melting pot of all of those. So they have a lot of student assistants, and there is a program assistant as well that leads the entire program under Professor Spector’s guidance. So it’s a great program on campus. I think it started like three years ago, and it’s essentially trying to bridge a gap, because you can see how, like, these big institutions have the AI programs where people can talk more about AI, and also have these kind of events going on, but on campus, there is a clear lack of events related to AI. But AI is taking over the world right now, like everyone is using AI, so you need to kind of have that literacy and also encourage creative thinking with AI, because, again, you need creative thinking. Human thinking is, like, irreplaceable at the moment, at least. So, yeah.
Ella:
Yeah. I am a humanities student, and so in the humanities, I think AI is very looked down upon, kind of, what you mentioned–there’s no replacement for human thought or human creativity. But how do you see AI as potentially having an impact, whether that be positive or negative, in the social impact space, like, as companies in this new political climate, move to either be more inclusive, or the opposite of that. How do you see, basically, AI affecting the social impact space?
Dhyey:
I’m no expert, but this is what I think. So I think if AI is used correctly, it would have a positive impact on society, especially in the social impact space, because if you treat it as an augmenting tool instead of a replacement, it’s always gonna help you. For instance, if you are trying to collate, like a set of jobs in social impact space, you need a software for that, right? You need to build a software. Again, building software is much faster now with AI, because it helps you write a lot of boilerplate code. So our innovation, Ideas to Innovation projects, have been like, at least 10x faster, like five to 10x faster because of AI, but, again, like you can’t use AI in the classroom, rightly so, because of the learning. But then when you really only care about the impact, and then also, like, of course, learn and understand the product because you need to maintain it, then you can strike this trade off, where you can let AI code a little bit more and then deliver impact much faster. So that’s one other thing is, again, just like writing up documents, I know, like human thought has no replacement to it, but like, even searching a lot of stuff, for instance, there are modes in perplexity. So these are the modes that allow you to put forth a problem, or like a thesis statement, and then find sources supporting them. Sometimes it does hallucinate and gives you sources that don’t even exist. But then if you can get like 30 to 40 sources, and let’s say 10 of them are like fake ones, like at least 20 or 30 of them are gonna be the relevant ones. And maybe if you can find the four to five between them, between the lines there, then that would save you a lot of time, instead of you going to like a lot of different websites and trying to figure it out, right? Again, that is only gonna get better down the line. And I think those kinds of things are really the biggest plus that the AI industry is offering in the social impact space. Furthermore, being more accessible to people is another thing, because, again, a lot of people don’t have experience in this space, and then onboarding people is really hard. It’s a big challenge. So having AI talk to them and onboard them, answer their questions up top, up front, without having an extra overlord that frees up a lot of time from the mentors and allows them to just get up to speed quickly and contribute.
Ella:
I definitely do see the potential for AI to have a positive impact in that it democratizes information. I actually interviewed Alex, who also works with i2i, and he was talking about how AI has democratized information that was previously only available to people in institutions like this. So, yeah, I can definitely see the positive potential for it. But my next question about i2i is, where do you see it going after you graduate, which is very soon?
Dhyey:
Yeah, bittersweet at the same time. So I have recently transitioned to a leadership team where we have two co-directors for engineering right now. So Ryan and Liam are the two people who are gonna lead the engineering team further. It’s here to stay again. It’s a RSO. So leadership will change as people graduate, but then I plan to contribute a little bit more from an advisory role now, after becoming an alumni soon. So that’s my idea behind contributing there, but I think I’ve established clear sets of principles and examples of projects that have been successful before. And some systems in place that I learned from the big tech companies that work really well, at least for i2i for now, with this scale that we’re dealing with right now, so I think it has a bright future, and people will be coming in like new freshmen, sophomores will be joining into the mission, and then trying to contribute as much as possible, trying to prioritize the projects on campus and figure out what are the needs and solve them. And that’s the single most important part of the engineering team, at least. I think it does have a great future, especially when we collaborate with faculty, different offices and even the president of Amherst College.
Ella:
Yeah, that’s very cool. You’ve mentioned a couple of your internships. I was wondering how they’ve affected your direction, both here at Amherst and in how you think about where you want your career to go in the future?
Dhyey:
Yeah, 100% I think that’s a really good question. My internships really helped me bolster this idea that communication skills are important, and how much going above and beyond is more important than just sticking to a certain task that you’re given. In both of my internships, I’ve experienced this, and furthermore, I think I specialized a lot more on information retrieval platforms. What that means is making sure that the recommendations at LinkedIn, for instance, are like the information that’s embedded in a big, massive database, is retrieved efficiently and effectively without losing a lot of the signal. And I learned a lot of techniques on that front, but on the soft skills side, I learned again, prioritization and communication, the two most important things. So they definitely helped my direction. I’m not sure what I want to do in like, five or 10 years, of course. But after graduation, I plan to join a big tech company, and then learn more about the industry practices, collaborate with senior engineers, and learn more about how to lead at that scale and come up with new projects. What are the most important trends in the industry at the moment–and then figure out stuff from there.
Ella:
That’s a really impressive goal. And it’s the dream of a lot of Amherst STEM students here. And it’s really great that you’re able to do that. So my other question is, how do you motivate yourself to stay so productive and perform at such a high level consistently?
Dhyey:
Yes, I do think about this a lot actually, and have been asked this question a lot of times too. So my go-to answer to this one is just, looking at the opportunity cost. I feel like we are at this age where we have a lot of energy and then we have a lot of opportunities available to us. I usually think about: what if I haven’t done this one before? Or like, what are the things that I learned from this experience that I’ll not get to learn, like later on in my career. And some of those nuggets are really helpful, even if you like spending two three hours on something, but you can see one or two nuggets of wisdom out of that that might end up shaping your entire future, because you might get hooked into those nuggets, and then you might want to explore them further, and that might be like your catalyst, or like your initiation towards a certain path, right? So I think at this stage, I personally feel like it’s better for me to try as many things as possible. Again, that has decreased since my freshman year, of course, because then you have to try a lot more things to figure out what you want to do. But again, like just making the most out of my time comes to me naturally because of the philosophy that I have for life, like religious philosophy, partly, but also from a standpoint that if I’m here, if I’m given this opportunity, again by Amherst College and the United States, then I should make the most out of it and then contribute the most to the community as well, and try to strike a balance there. Because again, you are only as strong as your community. I was basically nothing before I talked to the alumni of Amherst College, and they were so generous to offer their guidance. So it’s partly my duty to do so, and I do that through a couple of roles, like being a teaching assistant, being a peer career advisor, helping people with their resume, and again, as you mentioned, the SEO stuff, too. Again, I’m also learning on that front how to make it better, of course, there’s infinite room for improvement there, but just striking a right balance between the positions. You have to have internship roles so that you can get experience outside Amherst College, and also having just the right amount of classes, right number of classes on campus, right balance there, and also not missing out on the study abroad opportunities, because Amherst College offers that a lot more. And then you try to get the experience of what it is like to be outside Amherst and talk to people at different universities. And it’s, again, kind of like a melting pot of a lot of experiences at the same time, and you basically live life on like a 2x because you have a lot of experiences coming in from people, and then you learn from them. So you don’t have to live through those experiences. That’s how I see it.
Ella:
That’s a really amazing attitude to have, I think. So is just this is my own curiosity. But do you have any interests, or have you taken, any classes that aren’t STEM classes that really affected you?
Dhyey:
Yeah 100%. So I would say two really impacted me. The first one is Writing About Humor. It was by Professor Reardon in the English department. So we basically analyzed a lot of comedy speeches and the stand up comedies, and dissected it and figured out what’s so funny about it, and what kind of humor is most funny to people and is least offensive, and the like. That was great to learn, because, again, in communication. English is my second language, actually my third language. It’s really hard transitioning and figuring out, like, how to kind of connect to people at that level, because I do have to convert stuff in my brain when I talk. It has gotten better over time. And the second class, it’s a half-credit, is Craft of Speaking, parts one and two. I’m taking the second part right now. Took the first part last fall with Professor Bashford, he’s great. I mean, I learned a lot about strategies of public speaking and figuring out how to connect with people and how to, like, project yourself in a room full of people, like talking, presenting poems, presenting speeches. We were recently doing a Patrick Henry speech. It’s pretty fun. Just seeing how many things that go into presenting something impactful has really helped me. And I think definitely, like my thesis talks so far have been hugely impacted by that class alone. So I would definitely recommend taking that class. But again, those kinds of classes are something that I look out for. If I find something like that that can help me grow in a completely orthogonal direction to STEM regularly, like technical classes, then that’s amazing. Because, again, that is the unique thing that you have compared to your STEM counterparts at the STEM research universities.
Ella:
I’m sure they don’t read Caesar’s speeches and Patrick Henry’s speeches at MIT…no. Who knows, maybe they do. But anyway, my last question is, what is your advice to people who want to get the most out of the Amherst experience? Because clearly maxed out your time here. So yeah, what’s your advice?
Dhyey:
Sure. So I would recommend exploring a lot in your freshman year, sophomore year, and just when you come in, the moment you get access to the alumni directory, just try to reach out to as many people as possible. Again, don’t overwhelm yourself by just reaching out to a lot of them. But figure out what are the two alumni you want to talk in tech, and two alumni you want to talk in finance, you know? And you should be open to everything, not just tech and finance, like, everything, right? You might not know that you’re interested in tech, because let’s say you’re interested in creativity, right, like art, but there are user experience design and those kinds of roles in tech too, right? So you might get hooked on that. So you want to make sure, like, you are spreading a wide cast of opportunities in front of you before making any decisions, and let life unfold, basically, like, make decisions based on what you felt, instead of like looking at someone or like, talking to someone directly. So try to get those mini experiences, like when you ask questions to the alumni, figure out, just talk to them and just try to learn about their day to day. And then that will give you an insight into what your future might look like if you go into that route, and then also, upfront, ask, “Okay, if I am in my college experience right now, are there any projects or any any like experiences that I should get that would help me kind of get a meta level sense of what is it like to be in the career?” So those kinds of questions are really impactful, and the alumni also really love to answer them. Other than that, I would recommend engaging in on-campus jobs, because, again, that helps you a lot personally. It helps you grow in a completely different direction than being an academic, right? You should definitely take classes that are challenging to you, not only in the technical field that you want to pursue, or any field that you want to pursue, but also the field adjacent to it, because you have a pass/fail here that you can use, and that’s really helpful.
Ella:
Have you ever used a pass/fail?
Dhyey:
I haven’t, but I might this semester, not sure. Again, that just gives you freedom to explore a lot more. Because some of the risks you wouldn’t take [otherwise] will become easier if you have pass/fails. And that’s where Amherst shines, with the open curriculum. Furthermore, I recommend that people study abroad. You are allowed to do two semesters, you can do it abroad or away. For me, the US is abroad and also away, so I did Columbia University in New York my sophomore year. Then i did tk Budapest, so I got to roam around Europe a little bit, it was great. Amherst is really supportive on that front. If you are on certain financial aid here, that directly transfers over to whatever country you’re going to. The college is very generous on that. You don’t have to worry about jobs there, because you get the student employment stipend, too. It’s really a lot of opportunities that you can gain through that experience. You can talk to people in a different country about how they see the field that you wanna pursue as well, and then you have people from the different colleges in the US, too. For the summers, I recommend doing maybe research, or some experience that is useful for your personal academic or career growth. I’ve done internships and research experiences during my summers, those have been some of my most important experiences here at Amherst. It helps you see a completely different world, and go out of the Amherst bubble. Finally, if you’re up for a challenge and want to put a capstone on your understanding of a certain field, then you can do a thesis in the fields that you’re interested in. That helps you prioritize and juggle multiple things at the same time because, again, you will have a thesis project ongoing for the whole year, and that is likely the format that you will have when you work full-time on longer term projects. For me, I had one in math, one in stats going on, completely independently at the same time. I started in fall and tried to prioritize beforehand, come up with an agreement, a timeline with both of the professors, and then everything went smoothly. I feel like if you procrastinate and leave it all to the end, it is hard. But if you are very pedantic about the details, upfront with the professor, then if something weird happens during the research process–because a lot of the research is unexpected–then you can re-prioritize the goals with the professor, and they’ll be understanding of you, but if you are leaving stuff to the end, then you are setting yourself up in the trap of dropping a thesis, which is an option if you’re no longer interested in the topic. There’s nothing wrong with that, you can get a special topics course on your transcript and just learn through the one semester of experience. But then, if you have a lot of stuff written down for the thesis, and you work on the actual write-up as you go along learning about it, then there will be a lot more motivation. It’s like “Okay, I have 20 pages down,” then “I have 30 pages down,” and it will just motivate you further, and it will be easier for the professor to give you more guidance and go through your drafts. So that’s my spiel about the thesis experiences, they’re great experiences and I would highly recommend it because you can improve your presentation skills, your explanatory skills, and just leave a mark on the department and contribute to the field.
Ella:
Well, it seems like you’ve left a mark at Amherst for sure, and I’m sure we all appreciate your good advice and interesting stories and experiences, so thank you so much for talking with me today.
Dhyey:
Thank you, Ella.
