Ian Persaud[☀]

Cornell shaped my thinking about people — how they develop, how systems support or fail them, and how policy intersects with human experience. Studying Human Development gave me a rigorous framework for understanding behavior across the lifespan, while my minors in Health Policy and Nutrition for Performance pushed me to connect that understanding to real-world outcomes. It was here that I first learned to hold complexity: to ask not just what works, but for whom and under what conditions.

Questrom gave me the operational language and strategic lens to translate ideas into plans, and plans into action. The Masters in Management program pushed me into the mechanics of organizations — finance, operations, strategy, leadership — and challenged me to think like someone who builds things, not just studies them. It was the bridge from the theoretical to the practical, and from individual contributor to someone who could lead a room.

Mailman brought it all into focus. The MPH in Health Policy Analysis trained me to interrogate systems — who has power, who is affected, and what the data actually says beneath the surface. Epidemiology, health economics, program evaluation: these tools gave me the ability to hold rigor and equity in the same hand. Columbia also dropped me into New York City in a new way, forcing me to see the city as a living policy experiment and sharpening my instinct that good work must be grounded in the communities it serves.