MALVERN, Pa. — Bharat Sharma said he still remembers the date three years ago when his phone buzzed around midnight.
“It was the email that changed my life — my acceptance to Penn State Great Valley,” said Sharma, who completed his master’s degree in data analytics at the campus in 2023. “I still remember sitting there in disbelief, heart racing, thinking, ‘This is really happening.’”
Sharma grew up in Varanasi, one of the holiest sites in India, “a place rich in culture and history, but like many small towns, not always abundant in opportunity,” he said.
Sharma made the most of the opportunities he had. He took a high school coding class that sparked his interest in technology, which led him to a bachelor’s degree at Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology and publishing research about technical solutions to real-world problems, such as a crop inventory management system he envisioned that could help farmers in India share their surplus in areas with insufficient harvests.
“You can create programs that can do wonders for you,” Sharma said.
He gained experience in prototyping and implementation while working at a consulting company. After a few years, Sharma said, he wanted to get back into research, especially in cutting-edge technologies. He decided a master’s degree was his next step, and he chose Penn State Great Valley for the alignment he saw between his research interests and those of the engineering professors — data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and natural language processing.
When he was accepted to Great Valley’s Master of Data Analytics program, he said he remembered feeling joy that gave way to uncertainty. “How would I afford it? How would I manage a new life halfway across the world?” he wondered.
But Sharma’s excitement about research motivated him, he said.
“This is the right choice for me, even though it is going to be a little hard,” he said he thought at the time. “I think I should take that leap of faith.”
Soon after he was accepted, he got more good news: Penn State Great Valley offered him the Chancellor’s Scholarship, a competitive, merit-based award of $12,000 for full-time students.
“The scholarship I received didn’t just help me financially — it reshaped my career and, more importantly, my life,” Sharma reflected. “It allowed me to focus on learning, growing and immersing myself in a community that has given me so much.”
Sharma said his industry-aligned classes gave him a comprehensive view of data analytics and the lifecycle of developing technical solutions — how to design databases that facilitate data analysis, how to clean and process data, and how to apply visualization techniques, deep learning and advanced statistical analysis to understand and use the data.
Sharma also benefited from experiential learning as a research assistant for Dusan Ramljak, assistant professor of software engineering, who gave Sharma free rein to pursue his own research interests.
Sharma said Ramljak “lets you explore what kind of work you really want to do and then gives you the liberty to choose your method, fail maybe 10 different times, but find your way to success.” Sharma worked with Ramljak on five projects, including machine learning models for performance evaluation and for dynamic curriculum recommendations, a cybersecurity analysis for a nonprofit organization, and protocols to improve blockchain efficiency.
“This hands-on experience led to multiple research publications, further strengthening my industry credentials and giving me a competitive edge in the job market,” Sharma said.
He found a summer internship at World Wide Land Transfer, a title insurance company, which immediately hired him as a full-time director of AI and integrations, one semester before he completed his master’s degree. In this role, Sharma said, he enjoys finding ways to use AI to automate monotonous tasks and make people’s lives easier, asking himself, “How can I utilize the power of technology to help everyone?”
One of his first assignments in his new job was to use his expertise in natural language processing to lead the development of an AI chatbot that could answer clients’ questions about the real estate industry. Now, Sharma said, people can interact with the chatbot on the company’s website to get answers any time, even after business hours.
Sharma said he also engineered and implemented real-time dashboards and analytical reports, providing the company’s leadership team with insights for strategic decision-making and operational management. After he gave one department head access to a new dashboard he had created for her team, he recalled her big smile and appreciation for a tool that allowed her to track tasks and measure performance.
To show his gratitude for his education and its impact on his career, Sharma recently joined Penn State Great Valley’s engineering advisory council, where he contributes his expertise to help faculty stay abreast of industry needs and trends. He also expressed his appreciation to donors at a recent campus event, sharing how the scholarship he received changed his life.
“It gave me the confidence that someone out there believed in my potential,” he said. “Thank you for investing in students like me. Your contributions go far beyond financial aid — they build futures.”
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