Deepthi Harkar

I think greatly my hard work, the determination, my family and friends' support, and mainly where I am in the United States, where the opportunities are more compared to where I was. It's not just one thing that I would attribute to my success. It's a combination of things - my personal hard work, my determination to just keep going, and that perseverance that I had at every stage, because it wasn't easy, definitely. It wasn't a smooth walk. There were a lot of situations where I could have given up easily, but I chose not to. I feel like I achieved the highest of my field, highest point in my field. So it's definitely a lot to do with that perseverance that I had and that attitude, that positive attitude that I had, and I kept moving.

When I finished my undergrad, I had a couple options, and I'm talking about 2003-2004 times where computer science was booming. Back in India, you have to do entrance examinations like SAT for your master's programs. So I did both for nutrition and computer science, and I was in both of them. I chose computer science, obviously, because it was so in demand and like so cool thing to do at that time. But then my professor called me and she said, you will not regret being in nutrition, you can always learn computers and teach yourself, but this is something that's gonna be with you. I trusted her confidence in me, and I ended up moving into Nutrition Masters from a computer science, and I feel like that's the best career advice that I have received, and I don't regret being where I am now.

Don't give up when things kind of get hard, because they are going to. Just keep going, and you will feel that reward when you see that your client, the person with whom you're working, has reached their goals, and you see that happiness in them. It gives you that job satisfaction, which you wouldn't get in any other field. Just trust your instincts and keep going forward. This field is really vast and it's exploding in many, many ways, and they wouldn't regret being here.

Opportunities are unlimited. I think with so much buzz around the new GLPs and with ever-increasing chronic disease numbers all over the world, the opportunities are unlimited, and you could choose to be a private practice dietitian, to being a COO, to being a clinical dietitian. There are many, many opportunities. A lot of pharma companies hiring dietitians, food companies hiring dietitians, so opportunities are unlimited. Challenges are to find your niche in all of these areas, to see where you want to be. What is the most sought-after opportunity out there - it could be working for pharma, it could be more lucrative and pay more, but is that where you want to be? That's something that personally everybody have to assess. That's one of the biggest challenges, to find where you want to be. Once you know what is your niche, where you could create most impact, I think then there's no looking back. Another challenge is somebody like me who's moving across countries - it is to get your degrees evaluated, to make sure that you are aligned with the requirements that are here in the United States versus the rest of the world. And the third one I would name is communication. If you are not able to communicate in a right way, communication is one thing and right communication is the other thing. When you are talking about the food and telling the person what to eat and what not to eat and what happens when you eat something, it becomes really very, very emotional and personal. So right communication is extremely important, but if you're not equipped with those right skills, then it can become sticky sometimes. You may end up hurting people's feelings, which won't help anybody.

Ethics is the most important, both in my personal and professional life. Especially in healthcare, that's something that it's very important to be ethical in what you're doing, because there are 100 ways to do one thing, but choosing the right way is extremely important for me. So I would say ethics is one of the most important things for me.