Henna Karna, EMBA ’18

In this episode of Sloanies Talking with Sloanies, Christopher Reichert, MOT ’04, interviewed Henna Karna, EMBA ’18, who discusses her journey through academia and her professional career, reflecting on how MIT Sloan's unique mix of quantitative and qualitative learning has influenced her work. She emphasizes MIT's focus on engineering new patterns rather than relying solely on existing use cases. With a PhD in applied mathematics and a professional background spanning insurance, digital transformation, cryptography, and risk management, Karna shares insights on balancing precision and broad thinking, navigating the challenges of innovation, and applying mathematical creativity to solve real-world problems.

Karna recounts her diverse career, including her roles at the NSA, Google, and AXA, where she worked on cryptography, behavioral modeling, and creating open-source tools for risk management. She values MIT Sloan for its diversity of perspectives and its emphasis on creating meaningful impact. Karna advocates for empowering others over traditional change management and highlights the importance of aligning short-term actions with long-term goals to drive sustainable innovation.

Currently, Karna is a Harvard fellow focusing on AI's role in society and companies. She aims to develop principles to ensure AI complements human work and fosters responsible adoption. Defining success as finding joy and meaning in daily life, Karna advises prospective MBA students to embrace the rigorous learning experience, emphasizing that the effort put in will directly reflect the rewards gained.

Sloanies Talking with Sloanies is a conversational podcast with alumni and faculty about the MIT Sloan experience and how it influences what they’re doing today. Subscribe and listen on Apple Podcasts, Google, and Spotify.

Episode Transcript

Henna Karna: When I looked up MBA programs, MIT actually had an incredible balance between what can we measure and how should we measure what we need to measure. It wasn't just use cases and business cases, and it wasn't just trying to think about prior patterns. It was helping us engineer our own patterns. Even today, when I hire people from MBA programs, they don't have that lens that we had at MIT, which was so quantitative, so qualitative. The diversity was just incredible.

Christopher Reichert: Welcome to Sloanies Talking with Sloanies, a candid conversation with alumni and faculty about the MIT Sloan experience and how it influences what they're doing today. So what does it mean to be a Sloan? Over the course of this podcast, you'll hear from guests who are making a difference in their community, including our own very important one here at Sloan.

Christopher Reichert: Hi, I am your host, Christopher Reichert. And welcome to Sloanies Talking with Sloanies. My guest today is Dr. Henna Karna, a 2018 MBA Sloan graduate. Welcome, Henna.

Henna Karna: Thank you very much, Chris. It's going to be really fun to speak with you today.

Christopher Reichert: I'm looking forward to it. So let's give our listeners some background about you. Henna has a BA from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a master's and a PhD in Applied mathematics from UMass, before coming to Sloan for her MBA. So first of all, congratulations on the PhD. That takes dedication.

Henna Karna: Yeah, it was a very tough few years. I had set it up to do it in three years at a different school actually, and cryptography and that, that grant kind of lost its way.

My advisor passed away in the middle. It was quite a bit of a you can't imagine the drama in my doctorate, but I do think that it changed my way of thinking about precision. Sometimes I used to think that precision was very powerful, but as I got more and more into my research, it became so narrow and sometimes difficult to use because of its narrowness. So I learned that there's lots of good and bad about precision.

Christopher Reichert: Precision in the sense of having expectations of perfection and certainty. Or how are you defining precision?

Henna Karna: That's a good. Question. Precision in terms of knowing a lot about something that is very narrow. And not all doctors are like that, but sometimes I think for me it became an initiative. I went from cryptography to emotional intelligence to behavioral modeling and all of the shifting in that and trying to be true to the mathematics was, was really hard. And so some of it was kind of a runaway train in my mind. Academics is really great in thinking broadly, and sometimes you really just have to apply it slightly differently, right?

Christopher Reichert: So I guess that's, you know, the challenge of trying to know the unknowable, right?

Henna Karna: Yeah I agree.

Christopher Reichert: So, let's see, more about Dr Karna. She's a leader in the field of insurance and digital transformation. She has a background in actuarial science, data analytics, strategic leadership, and she leverages technology and data to drive business excellence. Originally, I guess in technology profession and then in insurance for a while. And now getting more broadly, you currently, as I understand, serve on the board of AAA, a very familiar auto club group. Hamilton, a global specialty insurance and reinsurance company and Ascent Guaranty. She's also an entrepreneur in residence at American Family Insurance and a member of the World 50, which is an invite only community for CEOs, boards, C-suite officers and executives from the global 2000. She was a mentor and investor at the Creative Destruction Lab, which I love that phrase, creative destruction, which I think it sums up MIT in many ways.

And a general manager at Google's global industry solutions area focusing on insurance, reinsurance, risk management. She was an EVP and chief data officer at AXA, which is a French insurance giant. And then you mentioned earlier about cryptography. She also worked at the National Security Agency in cryptoanalysis and cryptography. And if you look at her LinkedIn profile, it's the only entry where the description is a simple undisclosed. I guess that tracks.

Henna Karna: We like to say too little time. Right?

Christopher Reichert: Or is that one of those questions where if you have to tell me, then you have to kill me kind of thing?

Henna Karna: Could be either one. No, no, I mathematics background. So it wasn't a field work as much. Gotcha, gotcha.

Christopher Reichert: So in insurance, Henna was about mitigating risk management. And we started this conversation about knowing the unknowable, I guess, and sees as her mission as closing protection gaps and delivering customer centered products in insurance. But also, I guess with your your PhD work, you were focusing on cryptography, was it?

Henna Karna: Yeah, it started off there. But actually my master's focused on Cryptology was actually with a German professor. And then it moved into... so I used that as my preface for my doctorate. But I found more interest in human behavior modeling, which was an angle, I guess you can think from it from that point of view, but I'm not so much on encryption and decryption, but much more around why do certain human beings choose certain ways of doing something? And maybe my time and tenure at the NSA was influenced by that because we were trying to understand terrorism. We were trying to understand a lot of the the behavior, the backend behavior that might might give us some perspective. And I found that to be very difficult to model. So that became a great challenge for me. And UMass Lowell was the one area that would sponsor that job, that work. When you're doing your doctorate, the goal is to get sponsorship in that space. I had trouble with that. It was maybe a little bit too nascent, to be frank with you at the time.

Now, behavioral analytics has its own degree and you can get jobs in that. Not the case in those eras.

Christopher Reichert: You also describe yourself as an artist. So tell us more about that.

Henna Karna: Yeah, it's it's an artist wannabe, to be very fair. But I would have loved to have done it. So I guess mathematics is a second best option in my mind. And the reason was because I find it to be highly creative. And if you think about it, of all the things that we learn in our high school or in our sort of early education, it's the one space where we could get to a solution in like an infinite number of ways. We can solve a simple problem in mathematics or complex one. But we can do it in, in numerous, you know, endless ways. And I really found that to be highly exciting and creative. And as an artist, the reason I, I always wanted to be an artist was I think I found working with my hand, whether it was oil or woodworking, which was my first job, by the way, to be very expressive. And if I had had talent in that, I would have probably pursued it.

But I was not a very good artist. I was just one of those that that liked what I did for about a day, and then didn't like it when I came back to it. But math was different. Math to me was super creative and it always resonated. So I'm an artist wannabe in the form of a mathematician.

Christopher Reichert: So did you think that your your mathematics propensity or your attraction to math attracted you to work in risk management and figure out how to kind of solve those complex problems in some sort of rational, knowable way?

Henna Karna: Yeah, it's a great question. I don't know if I had that foresight. What I, what I had, though, was expression in mathematics is sometimes a little untangible, right. So when we think about the usability of something like our ability to model something, the usability of that, and how does that make the world anywhere better? You probably saw I did do a professorship on the tenure track at Babson, and I couldn't get to the R&D side only. It felt to me to be a little bit inconclusive, and I really wanted the application side of things.

So it just so happened in the era that I was in large, large volumes of information was sitting in the risk industry, and it was sitting there not quite being leveraged and used to proactively understand risk or to proactively reduce risk or to even help our economies mitigate. So that kind of was the marriage between my degree and my where my industry sort of expertise started to lie. It was really just how do you use mathematics in the best way possible for the world to be better? Well, we have a lot of natural catastrophes and some man-made catastrophes and and how can we get more resiliency and recovery from that?

Christopher Reichert: And I guess pulling the models together. So that was some of the work you were doing at Google, right, with some of the the 360 views of risk. And I was particularly interested also in the open-source component of that, where you were working to make it available to as many organizations or researchers as possible.

Henna Karna: Yeah, Google I mean, that's the one of the great things about Google is, is, is sort of its, its mantra for open source, right.

It has been known to do that again and again, and it was awesome to be able to leverage that. When we were building our capabilities for the risk and insurance space, it relied heavily on some of the sort of innate IP that Google has, you know, the Geo and the AI and some of the analytical fortitude that Google has. But we have lots and lots of people or organizations and ecosystems that don't know how to use how to do that. So, creating what we created and making it open source and making it in sort of in the availability and then training some of the SI firms, some of the system integration firms, on it was the best way to spread the value and quickly and sort of more fruitfully to every level of industry. So not just the big guys that could partner with Google but some of the mid and smaller tier organizations that couldn't partner with Google, but they could also lean into that capability.

Christopher Reichert: So these are sort of the rising tide lifts. All boats approach right.

Henna Karna: It actually that's exactly the phrase we used. Absolutely. Yeah.

Christopher Reichert: It makes a lot of sense when you were doing your PhD. You mentioned earlier that one of the challenges that you had was letting go of the notion of knowing all or at least being a master, getting to a certain level of mastery before you could then act on it. I found that's true with system dynamics that in some ways there's it's fascinating, but it's also it assumes you all the inputs are accurate. Maybe I got that wrong. What's your take on that?

Henna Karna: That's a great point. It almost comes down to the reality that we can't create a full reality on a sheet of paper. But what system dynamics helped me do, actually, was it forced me to highlight the real factors at play. You know, what were the primary? Maybe not the secondary and the tertiary for sure. But what were the primary factors at play? Enough for us to focus on and maybe, maybe the right few to focus on. And sometimes that iteration was really important. I think my first couple iterations of just understanding the ins and outs of Google and how we work with such a large ecosystem of players, just drawing that out forced me to really think about the weight of each of those arrows.

Right. And are they the most relevant ones, and am I capturing enough to actually make an impact? The principle right to realize we can't put all of them on a sheet of paper. And it's a big fear to think maybe we missed the actual most important one.

Christopher Reichert: So is that and that kind of goes to the continuous improvement model that you were that I read you an article, you talked about the limitations of continuous improvement versus kind of leap making a leaping change, that S-curve leap, and how you can miss the forest for the trees if you're, I guess, conservative and following the current path, is that something that you that you struggle with or organizations that you were working with struggle with?

Henna Karna: Yeah. You know, um, it's a great question because I, I'm actually leaning into that, that I'm starting a fellowship at Harvard, and that's very focused on what is artificial intelligence going to do, and is it a continuous improvement dialogue that we're having, or is it really an evolutionary shift?

And I am assuming it's going to be both, to be honest with you. But one of the things I mentioned in that conversation about continuous improvement, it was around the hype of being sort of short sighted. If you think about organizations, many, many of the roles that people are in, they're about there for 3 to 4 years. If they do enough continuous improvement initiatives, it looks really good on paper, but it doesn't always make the company move.

Christopher Reichert: Right. This is the quarterly success versus the longer term.

Henna Karna: Yeah, exactly. So we have to create a mechanism where we are measuring the longer term value. But we're executing on a on a more short-term basis. And sometimes we don't do that. And there was a real big disconcerting approach on just doing continuous improvement for sort of repetition purposes. Little by little, little. And you will miss, you know, if you do let's say A through B and then we don't know what Z. You know, A through Z looks like we're going to do a B and then CD and then you know EF and whatever in such small increments, and we're actually increasing cost of maintaining those small increments. So we're not reducing the marginal cost to the company. And we're really not creating in any type of a skill set efficiency either. So, we're, for lack of a better word, we're creating silos.

Christopher Reichert: Right. And you're zig zagging as opposed to kind of arcing towards a longer-term goal.

Henna Karna: That's right. And the S-curve starts to break.

Christopher Reichert: Right. And so how do you how have you kind of approached that and struggled with that.

Henna Karna: It's been a it's in each of my roles. It's been an active dialogue. I every time I've joined organizations, there is a sort of an expectation that you that you are hit with, that we're going to continuously improve because we're bringing you in. We're going to see progress. And and it takes some education to really talk about, well, where do we want to go? Is our goal meaningful enough? Are we thinking big enough that we want to put the inertia in that direction and not just go with the flow, because we've been doing it that way for the last, you know, couple hundred years?

Some of the companies, as you can tell I've been asked, are a couple of hundred years old. Google being the youngest of the few. So, I guess they it has hit me hard. It's taking me time to articulate and educate our leadership team and our board sometimes that we don't want to miss the forest for the trees, and we want to create a lasting impact. And that's generationally beneficial for the company and the people that are in it. And the companies benefit to the economy. I think those are really key factors. And oftentimes that does work if we think big enough and realistic enough. We have to be pragmatic in our approach. But every time I've done that, I've been able to also articulate a roadmap to get us there. What are the key milestones are minimal viable products? Actually, at MIT, we studied the Broad Institute, as you know. And so from my AXA days, I bring my leadership team to the Institute to just look at what happens in a workflow process in genome. And that's a very complicated.

You know, we think our world is complicated when it comes to corporate America, but it's very complicated. And then the body. So just to give us a realistic sense of what does it mean to be very consistently cyclical in our approach to get to where we want to go, but having a bigger picture in mind? I think that balance is pretty critical. And it's worked, you know, time and time again, to be honest with you.

Christopher Reichert: So change and change agents I think are the are the highest risk positions to take and roles to take on in an organization. How did you navigate those, I guess entrenched continuous improvement or iterative movements in our organization, which it's probably more imperative in a public company than a private company. I suspect you might have more leeway in a private company because they have less reporting responsibilities or at least external noise, if you will. But even so, within an organization, particularly of any size, there's going to be entrenched interests in one direction. And how have you navigated introducing change?

Henna Karna: Yeah, it's an insightful point of view there because it is very difficult. It's almost like the thankless job if you think of it that way. Or a forgotten hero kind of a concept where and I was writing an article about that's titled Show Me a Hero, because it isn't always the CEO that needs to sign on the dotted line to get everything progressing. It's not that you have CEO approval, then everyone follows suit. It's not how it works. You could also have internal buy in, but still no one actually, you know, lifting a finger to help you get where you need to go. So I think innovation has become kind of a buzzword. But really, truly innovating is a is a task that does require really thick skin. And that's partly why it requires us to know exactly what we're trying to achieve. You know, we have to have a a bullseye or a target date that's really, truly defined so that we can anchor on that and that when those really, really hard days come, which will be many that we know why we're getting up every day and we know why our motivation is continuous, why we have the tenacity that we do.

It's not just stubbornness. It's true mission driven energy. And I guess the way that it's worked for me, education perhaps is, is a big plus point in my career. I as an educator, I learned that you could tell the same story to the same audience, with the same amount of energy, day after day after day, and maybe the third or seventh time. People say, right, the seventh time it takes seven times to really figure out what someone's telling you. But you have to say it with the same level of genuine respect to their point of view and to what you're trying to achieve. And my MBA at MIT was really powerful in this, because I found it to be very inspiring to create artifacts, to create a proper taxonomy in the company. I used those sort of two pillars to try to pivot us, to think differently without forcing, you know, going against the inertia, right, to really think differently. And in fact, some of I'm writing a book and one of the factors is to not think about change management, but to think about empowerment management.

And what does that look like? It's a very different concept to think about how to change a company versus how to empower everyone to think in a different sort of trajectory. It's a whole different sort of game, and I think I really much rather prefer empowering others and enabling outside in thinking, and that getting us going where we need to go.

Christopher Reichert: I think in some ways, listening to you speak about that, it seems to go against almost the grain of hierarchical organizations where claiming credit or having credit be ascribed to you or to your team is really important for progress. Whereas if you share it, then you might not get the credit and might not be in a position to have the sponsors or whatever it is that can support you in the next initiative.

Henna Karna: Yeah. So I'll tell you one quick story I had with our CEO at one of my companies. He had left then, and so I had a new CEO at the time, but the former CEO and I had this conversation, and he said to me, Henna, it's a couple years in, are you sure you want to continue down this path?

And I remember telling him and I said, oh, it's well beyond me. It's not it's not about me continuing down this path now, this, this, this initiative has its own arms and legs. And whether I chose to do it tomorrow or not, it's going to continue. And his face turning completely full of joy because it because I think he expected me to say, yeah, it's been so tiring. I am so exhausted, and I can't ever get the credit I deserve. And it was about two and a half years in, so it wasn't like a short duration or anything. But as I reflected what I was saying and I realized how true it was actually, to be honest, Chris, because we want our work to be defining of what the value of the work is. And I know we want to, of course, from our career standpoint, we want it to be beneficial to our careers. We're human beings. We need success to or we need to feel successful in what we're doing and some, some validation of our activities. We all need some validation. I'm not any any better than anybody else in that way.

But if we're anchoring to that big vision and that mission, then really the energy that we're putting into it is to create this movement that, with or without us, is going to proceed. And that concept of leaders create leaders. They don't they don't create followers. It's the same thing, I think, when it comes to products or capabilities, we make things that are going to create value, whether we were there tomorrow or not. And so, it is a catch 22 when it comes to career and mission. It can be.

Christopher Reichert: It's ironic that you've spent a bit of time in an industry that's all about risk mitigation. But I in looking at your career trajectory, ten years after you got your PhD, you then went back and got an MBA. And now you have this fellowship at Harvard for advanced leadership. What does it say about you.

Henna Karna: Perpetual learner? Um, it says that we should always step back and reassess. I think you know what we what we understand, what we're maybe creating boundaries from. For me, my career has been pretty lonely, to be honest with you.

I haven't had the luxury of supportive bosses or mentors that, you know, had my back necessarily for more than a few months at a time. So, I think for me to step back and to say, am I still in agreement with my thought process? What am I missing from the echo chamber that perhaps we create even inadvertently? So those are the things that I think when I joined the MBA program, it was super enlightening to meet. My motivation, honestly, was outside industries, you know, risk and insurance risk particularly is transversal to every industry. You know, we have that in supply chain and telecom and CPG and healthcare and to step back and meet others that had those expertise and those industries and recognize their point of view. It was game changing for me, and it took a lot of courage, but it was worthwhile. It was truly worthwhile. And I think the same thing now is after my Google days and then, you know, working with so many startups and so many, you know, hundreds of companies during my tenure at Google that were perhaps looking at AI as a foreign concept or looking at AI as a disruptor and not an enabler.

And then the hype in the market about how AI is going to change all these jobs and it's going to replace people. And it took me back to give me a moment to say no, you know what? I need to step back and think about this and put a position in place. And that's why the fellowship is there as well.

Christopher Reichert: So you were you worked for ten years roughly before you decided to go to pursue an MBA, and in that time you were in the insurance industry primarily.

Henna Karna: For that time frame. Yeah. Yeah.

Christopher Reichert: And did you look at graduate school as a way of pivoting to something new and different, or how did what made you say, okay, it's time to go get an MBA and why Sloan, for that matter.

Henna Karna: Yeah. It wasn't a pivot. Even my even my fellowship. I guess people do a fellowship for pivoting. I don't see it as pivoting. It's very open ended for me. Whether I pivot or not is completely questionable. But what I did know was that the audience and the people around me were looking too similar. Not physically. I meant more, more thought process wise. It was getting more and more narrow in the thought process. And I recognized that it was getting too similar. You know, I was around the same kinds of mindsets and same perspectives, and I needed that sort of like awakening to so and then, um, MIT Sloan's program. I am very quantitative, I guess. You know, just my DNA is highly quantitative. I do believe in the world of science, but I'm also very philosophically aware, I guess, you know, because of mission and vision, those are really important concepts to me.

When I looked up MBA programs, MIT actually has an incredible balance between what can we measure and how should we measure what we need to measure, and how do we force an unbiased nature around that. And so scientifically keeping that open door, that science isn't all of the answers, but we need it to sort of start to create a mechanism to follow. Right. I that to me was very powerful. So it wasn't just research, it wasn't just use cases and business cases, and it wasn't just trying to think about prior patterns. It was helping us engineer our own patterns with our industries in mind and other industries in mind. And it was an amalgamation of so many different points of views. I don't think any other MBA that even today when I hire people from MBA programs, they don't have that that lens that we had at MIT, which was so quantitative, so qualitative. The diversity was just incredible.

Christopher Reichert: If you look back on, I guess it's what, six years since you graduated, are there any courses you wish you had done or any courses you wish you could do over?

Henna Karna: Oh my gosh. There are so many. Specifically, I think finance. The higher up I got, the more acute I got to understanding corporate finance. So, I wish I could just redo that all again. So, you know, we at MIT of course have the electives in January. So, year on year I go back and I look for those courses to, to revisit my thinking on them. Because when you're in the program and you're maybe not applying them as much as you, you realize you need to later on. Again, a benefit of MIT, we have those electives that we go back to and those day long classes that we can sit there and just reassess our thinking, you know, recalibrate our points of views and again visit with so many other people from different backgrounds.

It does keep us quite aware and quite humble about how much we do understand and how much we have more to learn.

Christopher Reichert: Yeah, certainly an MBA is a very different learning experience than a PhD. If you look at the two of them, do you think that that one balanced the other in a way, given that I think the nature of PhDs is to go very deep and very narrow and have some sort of breakthrough. And whereas the MBA is, I think, broader, right?

Henna Karna: Yeah. And which is so different than an MA right? Than a master's. I I'll be honest with you, I think for many years, even after my doctorate, I did not know what an MBA would do for me. And I used to hire folks that were MBA graduates. And I used to think, oh, they don't really understand depth. And but I was wrong. And I think the combination of these two things are remarkable. Even in my class at MIT, we had, I think, 27% of our physicians, they were they were actual doctors. So, I think the concept, the importance of an MBA has really evolved. It's really evolved.

And it's not just a Master of Business Administration. It's something completely different. It is really a how do how do economies work? How do businesses work? It's really that kind of learning. And when we're running or part of companies, we should have that angle of our knowledge intact.

Christopher Reichert: I think for me, it was about learning about frameworks and how to sort of apply frameworks to to something new and unknown to make sense of it.

Henna Karna: That's such a great point. In my doctorate, I had to do all these rubrics to assess models and I don't even think I, I think I did it because it was required. I don't think I understood the reasoning behind it. But during my MBA, to your point, I think, Chris, we had our frameworks because they were they were live, they were real. And you could almost understand the dimensions because you were seeing them at play. Um, not theoretical. So to me that was so powerful.

Christopher Reichert: So tell me more about the fellowship. Is it a set time or is it something?

Henna Karna: It actually is one year. So we do a lot of social impact work. And I am gearing it towards artificial intelligence and its impact to communities, companies, cultures in companies. I really do believe it's people before I, I have a thesis that I put together for the application process. And so now I'm able to sort of assess that with the companies that I'm advising. There's a few companies that I'm advising right now in addition to the board. And of course, there's a lens from that to the boards that I'm on, but it really will be helpful for me to understand what are we doing in organizations when it comes to having AI sit at the table with people and keeping the human in the loop when it comes to that conversation of models and modeling information going forward. And I'm committed to in the year that I have to position some opportunities or principles that companies can then use to adopt it more appropriately, in a timely fashion and not an aggressive fashion. I think, you know, evolution versus revolution when it comes to bringing in technology that's going to be so prominent in our workday, you know, in our productivity, in our life.

You know, we went from the internet era to the mobile era to the social era, or not, the AI era. And that is defining as we go.

Christopher Reichert: Yes.

Henna Karna: So I'm hoping to, you know, create a leapfrog for companies to, to create principles that they can lean into right away.

Christopher Reichert: So what's your definition of success for yourself or for the fellowship or for AI? Or you could define it.

Henna Karna: Yeah. Success is one of those words that that it it to me is a daily, it's a daily statement. I think when we say people are successful. Gosh, it's such an odd concept. People can be successful in academics, they can be successful in their career, but not in their life and not in their family and, uh, or in their family, but not in their career, I don't know. So, I find success to be too vague, too ambiguous. I try not to tell my kids to be successful. I tell them to be happy. And that is something that we, you know, we get to decide every day. So, to me, success and happiness are probably akin to having joy in life. I know that's not maybe a technical definition, but I think successful people are those that have found meaning in whatever they're doing.

You know, whether it's filling mail in the mailbox or whether it's, you know, creating pavement for the ground or whether it's being a gardener or whether it's, you know, being in corporate America. I think we do know this, but sometimes we forget that. So to me, it I've now realized more and more the older I get and the more I have to mentor other leaders and educators and entrepreneurs, that success is very much finding a reason to be happy, finding, you know, finding your gratitude moments that does give you the positive energy to feel successful and when you're feeling successful, you tend to become more measurably successful.

Christopher Reichert: Hear, hear! I think that's a great that's a great, great answer. What about any parting advice to prospective Sloanies?

Henna Karna: Uh, it's well worth every hour of homework.

Christopher Reichert: You might not get too much, uh, cheering on that answer, but still.

Henna Karna: Yeah, well, I'm six years out, so I get to enjoy it. All the learnings.

Christopher Reichert: I guess I would interpret that as you get out what you put in right?

Henna Karna: For sure. I think we do get out what we put in and, and I wish I had known this at the time that, you know, the electives are more reasons to put in and, and get out what we put in. Um, so sometimes I, you know, I had used to worry that, oh, my gosh, I'm not able to absorb as much as I need to while in those courses, and it's such a great feeling to realize that I still have time to learn, and I can still go back and revisit and the open nature of MIT's community, you know, it sort of encourages that, which is so nice.

Christopher Reichert: Excellent. Well, thank you to Doctor Heena Khan, a 2018 graduate, for joining us on this episode of Sloanies talking with Sloanies.

Henna Karna: Thank you so much, Chris.

Christopher Reichert: My pleasure.

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