Student Profile: Ayush Yadav, MPP Class of 2024

“The beauty of Harris,” said Ayush Yadav, MPP Class of 2024, “is that you have so many brilliant people around you with totally different academic, personal, and professional backgrounds and skill sets. It’s an amazing opportunity to understand the breadth of people you’ll be interacting with in the future.” 

Yadav’s motivation to explore policy began while earning his bachelor’s in political science at the University of Delhi. “I was interning at the Center for Policy Research in India, and my work primarily focused on clarifying varying COVID mandates across India: we wanted to increase public information and access to services. However," he added, "in the Indian government—historically, at least—policy is not written in a manner easily understood by all.” Reviewing and clarifying the mandates, Yadav said, cemented his conviction that policy should be written as directly and straightforwardly as possible, “because it applies to everyone.”

Yadav subsequently attended information sessions at UChicago’s Center in Delhi to learn more about policy programs. “The info sessions were invaluable because I was very hesitant to apply to UChicago. Not only was my background primarily theoretical—without any substantive math—but my undergraduate degree from the University of Delhi was a three-year program, which few American universities accept for graduate school applications.” After conducting more research, Yadav said UChicago was the only school to which he ended up applying.

The supportive Harris community, said Yadav, made the transition from undergraduate to graduate school more seamless. "When I landed in Chicago, my roommate Logan was my guide to the city: he showed me all over and made me feel like I had lived in Chicago for years. And Rutvi, my friend, cooked me so many meals in the first year. She quite literally kept me alive!"

As one of the younger students in his class, Yadav encourages Harristas to pursue coursework that resonates with their policy areas of interest—and not to be intimidated if they don't have a strong coding background. “You don’t need to be a coding whiz,” he said. “It might feel daunting, but coding is less a skill and more a tool. And learning that tool has given me confidence because I also have the statistical tools to interpret data.” 

The supportive community, Yadav said, extends beyond classmates. Over the course of a few visits to Professor Luis Martinez’s office hours, he learned that his research and my policy interests overlap.  “Since I wanted to pursue research, I decided to ask him for spring quarter 2023 elective course recommendations, which he provided. Then, he offered me an opportunity to conduct independent research with him." 

Professor Martinez said, “Ayush is very entrepreneurial and was able to gain access to an incredibly rich dataset on housing policy in India. These are huge files, and just being able to open them, clean them, and make some sense of the information contained was a daunting task. Working under my supervision, Ayush has developed valuable computing and research skills that will serve him well in future professional endeavors. He has been able to ask a meaningful research question and use data to provide a credible answer.”

The research, which Martinez and Yadav have collaborated on since Spring 2023, uses data from the Indian government to analyze the outcomes of the government’s housing programs—a flagship government program. "One of our principal research questions is whether government housing allotments under this scheme were politically motivated." While Yadav said cleaning the data in preparation for analysis was a long process, it was a rewarding and valuable component of the research. “I’m eager to see what the data shows.” 

As for plans after Harris, Yadav said he is excited to apply the analytical and political science skills he gains at Harris to create effective and accessible policies that best serve constituents. While Yadav acknowledges the Core Curriculum at Harris can be challenging, he said, "I look at my classmates—how committed they are as they pursue their passions—and it motivates me and reinforces that I can do it too."