Alumni Profile: Utsav Gandhi, MPP’20

“Graduating from Harris in June 2020—the outset of COVID-19—was challenging,” said Utsav Gandhi, MPP’20. “Many companies weren't sure of hiring needs, let alone what jobs would look like.”

 Thus, prior to his most recent role at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Gandhi explored several short-term consulting opportunities that spoke to both his interest in policy and communications. “Whether I was supporting Congressional-level political campaigns, philanthropic ventures, or campaigning with a nonprofit digital advocacy firm, I found many applications for the skills I gained at Harris. Most notably, perhaps, were insights from Professor Alexander Fouirnaies’s course on campaigns and elections. We had studied campaigns from an academic, scientific perspective, so it was exciting to transfer those lessons from the classroom to the community.”

 Gandhi’s initial interest in communications and policy was spurred after he graduated with his BS in business/industrial management from the Illinois Institute of Technology (Illinois Tech). “I was working in the field of technology and startups, and during the 2016 election season, I saw an opportunity to study political discourse regarding these platforms. Since I had also minored in policy at Illinois Tech, I decided to look at graduate programs in policy to study this emerging space—social media policy and regulation.”

 Gandhi said he had been initially drawn to pursue a Master of Public Policy degree at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy because of “the prestige that comes with a UChicago education as a whole. I was also interested in expanding my policy network, picking up tangible skills, and learning the inner workings of how policy is shaped.”

 At Harris, Gandhi threw himself into his area of interest. “During my summer internship, I worked with a professor at Georgetown on a research project studying communication, culture, and technology. We studied how journalists used Twitter to fact check politicians, specifically during the Indian election season that happened earlier that year. I leaned heavily on my R programming skills and was able to conduct and complete an analysis of approximately 4,000 of the 18,000 total tweets we had in our database. This paper was published in Digital Journalism (Taylor & Francis) in September 2023 and accepted for presentation at the International Communication Association conference that same year.”

Over the past three years, Gandhi has been using his MPP skills as a Research Professional for the Stigler Center at the Booth School of Business, working closely with Professor Luigi Zingales, the faculty director of the Stigler Center. “I worked closely on the Center’s podcast, CapitalIsn’t, which is co-hosted by Zingales, and that was a great learning experience. Not only did I hone my skillset and expertise in research and communications, but it also provided an opportunity for me to make an impact. For example, I helped translate a lot of academic and economic thinking into something accessible to the broader public.” He also worked closely in research and outreach for the Center’s digital publication, ProMarket, for which several Harris professors have contributed thought leadership.

His experience at Booth, Gandhi said, also inspired him to pursue his PhD.

“Pursuing a PhD feels like the natural next step for me. Combining my professional experience with the skills I developed at Harris to study the issue of social media communications from an academic research perspective is really exciting. I'm looking forward to honing my research skills and figuring out how to apply them to different emerging and ongoing questions of social media communications.”