He Came for the Credential and Left With a Mindset: Spotlight on Sumeet Malik

Sumeet M., MBA '25, will tell you, with refreshing honesty, that he didn't enroll in Santa Clara University's Online MBA program for the noblest of reasons.

"I didn't have any goals behind that," he said. "It was really—this is going to sound kind of bad—but my own ego. I just wasn't happy with having a bachelor's degree."

His father has a master's degree. His closest friends are dentists and doctors. The credential gap had nagged at him for fifteen years. So he applied to ten schools, got into nine, and chose Santa Clara with one objective in mind: Earn the degree, perform better academically than he had as an undergraduate, and move on.

That is not what happened.

Instead, Sumeet landed on the Dean's List multiple times, completed three concentrations, took more credits than he needed to graduate, became a career coach for the Leavey School of Business while still a student, and launched a new venture during the program.

"I am amazingly surprised," he said.

From the Bay to the Boardroom

Sumeet grew up in the Bay Area, the son of immigrant parents who came to the United States in the 1980s. Without a clear roadmap for higher education, he started at community college and charted his own path from there.

"I grew up in the wrong crowd. I didn't speak well. I had a lot of slang," he recalled.

An early conversation with his older sister challenged him to think differently about communication and self-presentation. The experience became a turning point.

"That was a real eye-opener," he said. "How I present myself is my brand and how people will welcome me into certain circles."

One belief has guided him ever since: Surround yourself with people who push you toward growth.

Four Careers, One Operating System

Today, Sumeet works at Meta, where he recruits executive-level engineering leaders supporting the company's AI initiatives. But Meta is only one of several professional pursuits.

He has also spent more than a decade as a Bay Area realtor, primarily serving first-time homebuyers and veterans. He works as a career coach, helping engineers pivot into AI-focused roles, and he’s developing a venture focused on dental staffing and education.

The common thread is helping people make decisions that shape the course of their lives. "There's a lot of crossover," he said. "How it impacts their families, how it improves their lifestyle, how it changes their life over one year and over the next 20 years."

The Coursework That Followed Him to Work

Sumeet pursued three concentrations during his Online MBA: Marketing, Entrepreneurship and New Venture Creation, and Leading Innovative Organizations. Each one was deliberate.

Marketing, because he wanted a playbook. In one class, he developed a 30-page marketing plan for an elevator company based in India—a business that was financially healthy but siloed in its market. By the time he finished, he'd built a strategy that addressed competitors, current positioning, and growth opportunities. "I know exactly what I need to do for my own business," he remembers thinking.

Entrepreneurship, because he grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. His father has launched roughly ten businesses since earning his own master's degree. "Everybody else has their own business," Sumeet said of his extended family. He wanted to understand the structure his elders had built by intuition.

Leading Innovative Organizations, because he wanted to be a better leader. He took a course in executive leadership specifically to refine how he communicated, both verbally and in writing.

The most surprising payoff came from a data analysis course he hadn't expected to lean on at work. He now runs regression analyses on Meta's recruiting pipeline to identify bottlenecks between sourcing, interviews, and offers. "I've been able to take that information to our leaders to say, 'This is where we have our bottlenecks. This is where we can create efficiencies, and this is the data that backs up our decision.'"

The Shift in Mindset

The most valuable thing the program gave him, though, wasn't a course. It was a community.

"I naturally assumed that people in Santa Clara were all going to come from a tech background, which was so untrue," he said. He met classmates working in finance, retail, and healthcare, and founders building everything from restaurants to baked-goods apps. Conversations with peers, professors, and Leavey's associate dean shaped how he thought about AI's impact across industries—not just tech, but finance, healthcare, commerce, and more.

The professors, in particular, surprised him. "Some of the courses I went into, the professors made such an impact on me that I wanted to work with them," he said. "There were many professors who I reached out to afterwards: 'Can I be an associate to you? Can I be a part-time professor? Can I play any part in helping uplevel the next cohort?'"

The networking events were where something clicked about professional presentation. He showed up in a sports coat and slacks; others came in jeans and tennis shoes. "I did recognize who was having those conversations with those individuals versus who was having conversations with me," he said. "I was having conversations with CEOs and founders who were presenting at these conferences."

To the engineers he coaches today—many with impressive technical skills but stalled careers—he gives the same advice: Presentation matters. "You can have a master's in analytics, you can have a master's in data science, and it'll give you all the technical chops you need to do your job well. But how you communicate on a behavioral side is just as important. In my perspective, it's 80% of how a company decides whether or not you are deserving of a promotion."

His Advice for Prospective Students

Sumeet has thoughts.

First: Don't expect an MBA to produce an immediate promotion or title bump. "That may not come immediately," he said. "But I can guarantee it will come, because you are now being provided with additional tools in your toolbox that will help you become an outlier in your teams or your organization."

Second: Do your research on the school but, more importantly, get to know the people running it. Before he committed, Sumeet booked a 30-minute conversation with the associate dean of the Leavey School of Business. It lasted two hours. They covered his goals, his motivations, the school's clubs, postgraduate options, even the real estate club. "That conversation with the associate dean was the indicator and made me decide to join Santa Clara," he said. They still meet regularly today, and the conversations have grown to include family, vacations, and life beyond business. "Connecting with people is being humanized."

Third: Come in with intention. Sumeet returned to school fifteen years after his bachelor's degree and was determined not to waste the time. He picked concentrations mapped to real questions in his life. He took on more than the minimum. He treated the program as a sandbox for the businesses he was building outside of it.

Build the Career You Actually Want

Sumeet's story is a useful reminder that an MBA program is not, on its own, a guarantee of anything. What it is, in the right hands, is a multiplier—of skill, of network, of the way you show up in a room.

Santa Clara University's Online MBA program is built for working professionals who, like Sumeet, want to keep their careers moving while they add new tools to their kit. The curriculum spans five concentrations—Data Science and Business Analytics, Leading Innovative Organizations, Marketing, Finance, and Entrepreneurship and New Venture Creation—giving you the option to specialize in the areas most relevant to your trajectory, or combine them, the way Sumeet did.

Faculty include educators and industry veterans with deep experience across Big Tech, finance, healthcare, and consumer goods, and the Leavey School of Business's location at the center of Silicon Valley means the conversations happening in your classes mirror the conversations shaping global business. With AI and machine learning redefining how decisions get made across nearly every major industry, Leavey faculty are bringing that reality directly into the curriculum.

The online format is built around the lives of working professionals, with four start dates a year, asynchronous coursework, and two on-campus residencies that deliver the kind of in-person connections that, in Sumeet's experience, turned out to matter most. As of summer 2025, 92% of Santa Clara Online MBA alumni reported salary increases within six months of graduation.¹

The deepest return on a program like this, however, isn't measured in a single number. It's measured in the conversations you start having, the rooms you start being invited into, and the version of yourself who walks out of the program two years later.

To learn more about Santa Clara University's Online MBA program and what it can do for the career you're building, schedule a call with an admissions outreach advisor today.