Lavanya Prahallad

I would say my quality of being curious, being resilient, and my willingness to keep learning. I'm grateful to my husband more than anybody, because he said, like, you know, hey, I can do this. I can be an entrepreneur. Yeah, he saw that spark in me before me. So, yeah, and many people have inspired me, and my professors who introduced me to educational technology.

The best advice I ever received is that whatever I do, I do with full dedication, and I need to stay curious. My professor once told me, stay hungry, and achieve great. So, stay curious, keep learning, don't be afraid to take risks. Even the small opportunity can get you to the Mount Everest.

I think, first and foremost, I always believe that all women should work, should be self-consistent, and they should believe in themselves, they should keep learning. Don't take the societal bias take over them. They should not stop trying. It's like, you know, I have come from a place where it's like, hey, you're a girl, you know, you should not be so aggressive, you should be, you know, you can find a protected environment, but I never believed that, and I wouldn't believe that also.

I think the biggest challenge that I have is finding the good mentors, because having that fire, that passion to teach is not everybody's cup of tea. Either they like to look for an extra money, or, you know, some weekend time pass thing, because we work on weekends. So finding the right mentor has always been a challenge for me. My company works on revenue sharing model. That means if I find a student, I get the money from student, I share that with the mentor. So if I don't get a student, I wouldn't be sharing any revenue with the mentor. So for a person who doesn't think money is the highest priority, helping students, making, shaping their lives is important. That kind of mentors is always hard to find, but I'm lucky I do have a couple of mentors in that way. And then another challenge is from the student's side. Research can feel very intimidating and very boring for some people. It's not everybody's cup of tea. One student can digest a program, and, you know, execute the program, and boom, they should have a result. So research is very, very time-consuming, and these days, I'm like, since I'm working with Gen Zs, so they don't have so much patience. They want everything just like that. And making them understand it's also been a challenge to me. So, yeah, I think that's what I'm basically dealing with two generations.

Integrity, I would say, like, integrity, continuous learning, and passion in what we are doing, like, you know, and they should have a mindset called give back to society, give back to the community. It's just like, you know, I'm [AGE], and I have taken so much from the society, so much from my teachers, so much from all the opportunities, but it's like, you know, we should have the quality of, you know, okay, this is our time to give it back to the younger generations, and we have to inculcate that kind of thinking from their younger generation, so that they can give back to their younger generations, and the society moves on in that way.