Radhika Lokur’s journey to Harvard Business School defies convention. In this episode, she opens up about her background in international development, navigating the MBA application process, and pivoting into a tech role in London. From GMAT challenges to building community at HBS, Radhika shares practical insights for applicants considering bold career shifts – and reminds us that the MBA path doesn’t have to be traditional to be transformative.
I studied economics and statistics at Xavier's in Bombay, which is in Mumbai. I knew that I wanted to go into international development - I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do in it - and that came from the exposure you get living in India as a privileged person. I really enjoyed the statistics part and wanted to see what I could do with it. There was a history of people from my university going to Yale for this particular master's degree, so that's what took me to Yale. I also applied to some schools in the UK at that time, but eventually decided that the US was a better place for me to be, because it gives you a post-school visa to work. It was a very practical decision, and if you know me at all, you know I'm a very practical person.
After Yale, I ended up working with a professor - Dean Karlan was his name - at a company called Innovations for Poverty Action. I did research for two years where we ran randomized control trials and helped publish research in peer-reviewed journals. I learned a lot, and my data analysis skills became quite sharp through my time there. But I realized that I like having interactions with people as part of my job, and there was very little of that as a researcher - I was just doing data coding all day. I missed having that people interaction; I'm an extroverted person and that gives me a lot of joy. That's what took me to consulting and that side of the same space.
ID Insight has offices in Lusaka in Zambia, in Nairobi, Kenya, and Delhi, India - at the time that I joined anyway - and they basically gave me an offer like, where do you want to be, which office do you want to be in? I said anywhere but India, because I can always go back to India. So they placed me in Lusaka, and honestly it was the best decision ever. I met my future husband there. I had three amazing years of living in sub-Saharan Africa, in southern Africa, traveling, just getting to know that space very well. I did some of the coolest things that I would never have done if I didn't live in that area - climbing an active volcano in the DRC, seeing the gorillas, doing lots of hiking, kayaking in the Zambezi where literally crocodiles and hippos are. I didn't know how dangerous it was before I did it, and I probably should have known. It was great, and it was the best time of my life.
I used HBS to help me pivot into the tech industry, and in the long run I want to combine these two spaces - go back to social impact and international development, but through technology.
That's when I decided I wanted to do something different and couldn't really figure out what the next steps were for me. Should I stay in development? Should I move into a different sector? It was actually an introduction to tech through my sister-in-law, who was at Amazon - and still is at Amazon - and she explained what her job was. I realized that my skill set can be used in different industries as well. Even AB tests are basically randomized control trials, and that's something I didn't know before. Because of that introduction, I realized that I could do something different and try out a new industry, because all of my work so far had been in the nonprofit space.
The way to do that effectively in the future is going to be through technology, so I want to be well-versed in both those spaces and eventually combine them. I'm still far away from it, but that's my long-term plan.
I applied before I had any kind of narrative fully fixed in my mind. After I had finished my application process and gotten in, that's when I started thinking more seriously about what I wanted to actually use the time for.
It was one of my recommenders, actually - he was one of the C-suite at IDinsight and he went to HBS about ten years before I did - and he told me I should know what I want before I go so I can focus my time better, and have some paths that I am trying to follow. His advice to me was to use the summer before school to really reflect on that and be intentional about my time at HBS. I took that advice very seriously, so I spent that summer really trying to think through what I wanted to do and how I wanted to do it. That helped me clarify the narrative.
To be fair, my essay does have something to do with tech and government - or really just increasing impact and scaling impact. I don't think it mentions tech specifically, but more social impact at scale and how to do that in a way that is business-friendly, because I see that as a much more sustainable long-term option as opposed to aid-based impact.
You don't need an MBA. That actually would have been my advice to people thinking of applying - really think about whether you need the degree, because if you don't, it's a lot of money to pay for something you don't really need. In my case, I was pivoting from a very non-tech background. I don't have a computer science degree, I don't have a business background, I don't even have a statistics background - and I needed some way to get in the door that was possible within the time frame I was looking at. That's why I made the decision to go through a business school.
I did really want to weigh the trade-offs: can I do this in any other way? Is there any other route possible? I thought about going into traditional consulting and then using that as a base to move into tech, but those are really hard pivots. So in some way I almost took the easy way out - the more expensive but maybe easier way out - and used the degree to pivot.
I applied to four schools: HBS, London Business School, INSEAD, and Stanford. The way I did it was honestly not a lot of logic. My boyfriend at the time - now husband - was already at Oxford, so London Business School and INSEAD were like, okay, we're close to Oxford. If I get into either of these, amazing - that makes my life much easier, because I knew I wanted to live in London after the MBA. I applied to Harvard and Stanford because I figured if you're applying to business schools, these are the best business schools in the world. And at this point I already knew finance was not my thing, so Wharton doesn't make sense for me - that's not where I want to go. But HBS and Stanford made sense given what I knew about the schools.
My rationale - and it's always how I think about things - is the cost-benefit analysis. If I'm spending that much time and that much money to do something, I would rather have it be something that's worth it. I would not want to spend $200,000 on a school that doesn't have the brand recognition or the things that I want to get out of it. So I chose based on that.
I was waitlisted at Stanford, but I got into LBS, INSEAD, and HBS. I was very close to taking LBS, to be quite honest, because I didn't want to do long distance - we'd done that before and I didn't want to do it again. But we had a conversation about it, and Tom, my husband, said you cannot say no to Harvard. And he was right. That's how I ended up at HBS.
I have a funny story. When I did my GMAT, I was supposed to apply in the first round and I had a GMAT booked for April or May - April, actually. I remember I went to Tanzania on a holiday; we were in Zanzibar and I was sitting in a room studying for my GMAT while everyone else was on the beach, because the GMAT was a week after the trip. It was painful.
I had taken a center in Lusaka - there's only one center. There were two computers at that center, and it was just me that day; nobody else was taking a test. Halfway through, the power went out, which meant the computers shut down. I ran out and said, "Hello, what do I do?" The guy came in and rebooted the system - the generator came on or something - but the computer had gone off. They had to reboot it, and luckily it had saved my progress and hadn't lost everything, but obviously in that time your mojo is gone. I also remember having to go to the bathroom at some point and there was no toilet paper. The whole thing was just such a mess.
I went back, finished the test, and I knew instantly it was horrible. I got a 640 or something. It was so bad. I left the center and I cried for six straight hours. My poor boyfriend - he literally said, "We have to get out of the house, because you cannot stew in this forever." I took a break for a few months and did the test again. That center has now shut down, because I complained to the GMAT people - I said this cannot be a center, this is horrible. In one way I feel bad, because I think there should be a center in Lusaka, but it needs to be better managed than that one.
Did you end up taking it the second time at that center?
No. I went back to India, because I felt it was too stressful to do this again in Lusaka. I studied in Lusaka but flew back to India for a week to do the test in Bombay. It was much better the second time around.
Next time, I would have applied first round, and I would have put more time into applying first round, because it was quite stressful to apply to all of them for the second round and it was all really bunched up. I didn't give myself the space to do each application individually. I did all of them at the same time, and that was a lot of work and a lot of stress while also having a job - and everybody knows that if you're trying to do two or three things at the same time, it's a lot. That's what I would have told myself: start planning a bit earlier and do the first round.
My application stood out because it was a very non-traditional MBA background. I'm from India, and the stereotype from India is an engineering background, men often. The fact that I wasn't either of those things may have worked in my favor.
From our class of 900 people, I think there were maybe under 50 who had a social impact or development background in the entire 900-person class. That already makes you stand out, which also means that in a section of 100 or 90 people, there aren't going to be that many people with your background.
I also thought about it from the perspective of what am I bringing to the room and what am I bringing to the discussion, as well as what am I getting from the discussion. I can be the voice countering the finance perspective to some extent - and I love the finance pros - but it's good to have a counter perspective, to say this isn't the only perspective that matters, you need to know the other side of the world and how other people live and get that perspective in. That's how I framed my essays.
My interview was actually a good experience - it was very conversational. I did it online, from my company's conference room. I asked them if I could use the room and just sat there waiting. I had three devices with Wi-Fi attached to them in case the power went out, because I was like, if this happens - and my first statement before anything else in the interview was, "The power may go out. If it does, I'll come back on - don't worry." The person who interviewed me had lived in Africa somewhere, or had some experience with it, so that also made it easier.
We talked about a book - we talked about Factfulness, Hans Rosling's book. It felt very natural. Beyond that, I don't remember the specific questions, but it was just a very natural discussion. It didn't feel forced or interviewy.
The HBS interviews especially - they try to make it more conversational. There's technically no question you can't ask, because it's really all about you. They try to make you feel comfortable, and they do a really good job of that.
For me it was the international brand recognition and the network size. I knew that I'm going to have a very international life - I wasn't planning to stay in the US. I don't know where I'm going to end up for the rest of my life. I might be in London, I might be in Australia, I might go back to India, I might be somewhere else. For that, the brand name makes a big difference, because everybody in the world is likely to recognize an HBS degree, whereas London Business School, for instance, doesn't have such good brand recognition. If I knew I was going to be in London my whole life, LBS would have been great, or INSEAD for example - in Europe these are very strong brands. But that was honestly the biggest thing for me.
I also liked having a two-year program with an internship in the middle. When I did my MA it was a one-year program, and I really felt the need to have an internship period because I couldn't get any work experience - it was just school and then apply for a job, and I found that really hard. So the two-year MBA really felt like an important thing.
There was a lot of things I loved and some things I didn't love. After living in a place like Zambia, working in international development, and then coming to a place that's kind of the center of capitalism was definitely hard. It was a hard mindset shift - I almost felt afraid to be myself to some extent. But over time I made friends, I met people who accepted that and weren't holding it against me.
There was just a sense of, wow, I'm around some of the smartest people I've ever met, and it's incredible. It's quite awe-inspiring when you think about it - you walk into a room with 90 people who are going to be your future friends, your network, your everything for so long. Those two years of all of that time we spent together, it's quite magical.
For a specific memory, I think about our Nashville trip quite a bit. It was a girl trip to Nashville, and we pedaled down the streets on one of those bicycle bars - so cliché and so ridiculous. It does remind me of the lighter things in life, and the fact that we got to do some of those things before COVID shut us down. I really enjoyed going on hikes with everybody, because that's the person I am. I like doing the outdoor stuff, and it's a part of me that I think I was able to explore more at HBS as well. I appreciate that people have multifaceted personalities - the finance pros like hiking, and I appreciate that. It was a good lesson for me to stop stereotyping people and putting them into buckets of, oh, I won't get along with them because they're capitalists. It's not true. Now I work at a capitalist company - I'm one of them. It was a good reckoning for myself to say, people have different parts of themselves, and it's good to always give them a try and learn about that part.
There was opportunity for a balanced perspective, but the cases were skewed towards one perspective - that's how I would frame it. You could always say what you were thinking and you could always speak your mind, so that was available. Whether people felt comfortable to do it is a separate question.
People are nicer than you think. The fact that I didn't always feel comfortable sharing my opinion says nothing about the people around me but says more about my own insecurities or inability to talk about my opinion in that forum. People are much nicer than you think, and everyone is willing to listen - or at least the people that I met and liked hanging out with. There are a lot more nice people than there are not nice people.
I knew that I wanted my job to be in big tech and I knew that I wanted it to be in London. Those are the two things I had as hard limits - I was not going to move beyond these. So I started looking at companies in the UK that would be hiring, but no UK companies except maybe consulting really come to campus. So it was a lot of self-motivation to go and find companies, make contacts, and build that connection to London.
Something I did that really helped was creating a London trek with a couple of other people within IO. There's a New York trek, a Menlo Park and SF trek, where everyone goes and meets companies and has introduction meetings with big companies, small companies, VCs, and so on - all in the tech space. I was part of the tech club at HBS and used that platform to create a London trek and make contacts at Meta, Google, Amazon, and a lot of VCs in the tech space. There were actually four of us who organized it, and everybody had different pockets of companies to contact. We created a three-day trek where we met maybe twelve companies over those three days, and it wasn't a big group - maybe ten to fifteen of us. That was pivotal because it helped make connections in a place where I didn't have any contacts, and we leveraged the HBS alumni network for it. The person I spoke to at Facebook - at the time it was Facebook - helped me through the process, helped me understand what it looked like, and introduced all of us to the company. We got a tour. That was really important and helped us understand what the application timelines looked like in the UK and what the process looked like - it was very different from the US. Through that, I got an internship, which then helped me get the full-time offer as well.
For anybody who's at HBS or at a school in the US and wants to go work somewhere else: make some kind of trek happen, because people understand what treks are and they are willing to have students come over and visit the company. It's pretty low stakes for them - it's just somebody coming to visit, talking about the company and internship opportunities. It makes a big difference if you can actually do it.
Did HBS have any involvement in helping you with the trek, or was it more that the framework existed and you just had to go execute?
A bit of both, to be honest. The framework existed, so it was much easier for us to do, but we needed connections. I went to the career center and asked for help - CPD helped me find the right people to talk to and suggested some names. Once I had those names, I went and LinkedIn-messaged them to say, can we do this? So pointing out who might be a good person to talk to was really helpful. The resources aren't just going to fall in your lap - there are so many you can go after, but you have to show some proactiveness to really get the full value.
Two things that I apply all the time. One is the reciprocity principle - we covered that pretty early on at HBS. It is so true in anything that you do: it's always you give and you get. A lot of our jobs require influencing people, building relationships, and having impact through other people. A lot of it comes down to this: you can't always be asking. You also have to be giving and willing to be that person. I try to apply that all the time, and it really helps in terms of building relationships. Your relationships are that much stronger when you're not only taking - you should be willing to give. That's one really big one.
That lesson actually came from a class - the Strategy and Technology class - and I think about some of the lessons from there all the time, like how a big company cannot do something that a smaller company potentially can, and how the markets react to that. That one sticks with me more because I'm at a big company and I sometimes think about whether I'd want to work at a smaller company or stay at a company this large, and I think about those trade-offs and dynamics fairly often, just because of the job I'm in. That class in general - if anybody wants to go into tech and goes to HBS, definitely take it. It was with YI.
The community is strong - it does exist. There's an HBS club here. Recently I went to a lecture - it was a dinner with Pill, who spoke for about 15 minutes and then it was dinner, which was really nice. He's the economist at the Bank of England, and I took my husband, who now works for the Bank of England, with us as well. It was very informal - just a chat and then dinner. It was so nice to have that option and meet people who were from different years at HBS, with completely varying age groups. I like doing things like that once in a while, but we don't do it often enough, to be honest.
As for staying connected more broadly - yes and no. I have my section friends who I end up meeting with more often than not, but the broader group, probably less so. That's just my choice. There are opportunities, but I gravitate towards people who want to go for hikes or go outdoors, and that's how I want to spend my time.
I work for an American company and half my teams are in Seattle, so I do end up working evenings quite a bit.
This is less about the MBA application process and more about being a career pivoter. I would recommend trying not to pivot on too many dimensions if possible. I pivoted on way too many, which is also why the last few years have been quite hard. I pivoted industry, job type, size of company, geography - everything. It was doable because HBS lets you do that, and often business schools, obviously with your effort involved as well, will help you make that transition. But it doesn't always mean it's the best transition for you.
Be very considerate of that, and give yourself some grace. Try to pivot on fewer dimensions - at least stay in a place you know, or in an industry you know, but pivot the job type. You can feel like you can do it, and you definitely can, but should you? That's something to think about a bit more carefully.