Ananyaa Joy Nair

After growing up across the U.S, India, China, South Korea and Malaysia, Ananyaa Joy Nair made a home for herself within the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. 

She knew her passion was at the intersection of people and technology, and she discovered engineering management as her ideal path. 

“Engineering offers a basic toolkit that teaches you how to think and be a problem-solver,” Nair says. “That is something you can use in so many ways, from approaching small challenges in your daily life to much bigger existential problems in the world.”

During her time in the Fulton Schools, she embraced opportunities beyond the classroom. Nair worked on campus as a writing mentor, serving hundreds of students by providing feedback and offering help for them to achieve their writing goals. 

She also interned at the Aspire Institute, a nonprofit that offers a fully-funded leadership program to empower limited-income and first-generation college students. Nair says the internship was one of her first experiences where she felt she was making a meaningful difference.

“I helped design a leadership course and bring it to life by working with senior members of the team, including faculty at Harvard Business School,” she says. “It was launched with 100,000 students enrolled in 2024, and the community continues to grow.”

Nair also interned at Bank of America, where she applied the skills she’d learned to the financial sector. Through the experience, she discovered she enjoyed working in finance. 

Nair is proud of the instincts, critical thinking and curiosity that she cultivated while navigating her degree.

“I discovered that I best enjoy learning that can be widely applied,” she says. “I wanted to do work that involves people and explores how they work individually and with technology to create efficient systems.”

Nair’s capstone project, Sew Psyche’d, developed a plan for community outreach for the NASA Psyche Mission, which encourages people to design their own square of textile media that will be merged to form a collective, tactile representation of the unexplored asteroid.

“It was an incredible experience to start working on a project from scratch and implement many of our course learnings directly to our deliverables,” Nair says.

After graduation, she will continue her education at ASU, pursuing a master’s degree in industrial engineering through the Fulton Schools Accelerated Master’s degree program while working as a global operations analyst at Bank of America. 

Favorites

Hobby: Cooking
Movie: Inception
Sport: Tennis
Game: Monopoly
Performer: The Weeknd

Read about other exceptional graduates of the Fulton Schools’ fall 2025 class.

Written by Hannah Weisman