The Real Humans of the Carnegie Mellon Tepper Master of Science in Management (MSM) Class of 2026 show exactly why this program is such a strong bridge between undergraduate study and high-impact business careers: it attracts early-career talent with serious analytical horsepower, real leadership reps, and a clear desire to pair technical or nontraditional backgrounds with rigorous business fundamentals. From sports and engineering to data science, product and program management, and economics, these students arrived in Pittsburgh ready to stretch, leaning on Tepper’s tight-knit cohort and famously hands-on support to accelerate their trajectories.
For Ainslie Vanneste, the MSM is a chance to deepen her business foundation right out of undergrad after studying sports marketing and management. A former Division I rower who loves skiing, she brings a steady, people-first leadership style. Mouli Majumder comes from IIT Roorkee and two years as a data scientist at Fractal Analytics, consulting for Visa on large-scale merchant analytics across global regions. Eager to move from generating insights to shaping decisions, she chose Tepper for its data-driven DNA and small-cohort culture.
Mitchell Stokey adds an engineer’s approach grounded in hands-on manufacturing and automation experience, shaped through multiple internships and roles with companies like Allied Machine & Engineering, Hendrickson, and FANUC. With an extra year of football eligibility, he saw the MSM as a smart way to layer business operations knowledge onto his technical toolkit. Xingyi Yu, fresh from UCL with an economics background, is using the MSM to build a stronger launchpad into finance while also immersing herself in a new culture. She’s drawn to Tepper’s analytical rigor and highly personalized career support.
From tech program management into finance, Shabbir Khan brings experience at Salesforce, Dolby, PepsiCo, and Panasonic, where his curiosity about major acquisitions and capital decisions pulled him toward corporate finance, investment banking, and capital markets. And Witt Conger offers a distinctive mix of psychology and philosophy from Georgetown, plus coaching, sales, and project management, alongside the competitive mindset of a former Division I athlete and NCAA men’s soccer national champion. Sold on Tepper through unusually personal access to program leadership and career coaching, he’s focused on roles that blend finance and relationships.
Read on for their stories.
