Eshita Gupta’s decade-long round trip from New Delhi, India, to Tampa, and back contained a thrilling conclusion.

Gupta, a lead project manager for analytics infrastructure at Apple, recently was a speaker at the Global AI Summit. Bennett University hosted the event … a mere hour away from Gupta’s home city.

“I definitely call that a full-circle incredible moment,” Gupta said. “It was such a meaningful experience. People from academia and industry who are shaping the future — one of the most rewarding parts is you build connections with people.”

Gupta’s journey to Tampa was to supplement her computer science undergrad studies in India. When she enrolled at UTampa to pursue her MBA, Gupta encountered a whole new academic world. “I always studied computers in India. Never accounting, marketing or finance,” Gupta said. “My first classes in Tampa, I was amazed! I was not aware of this world. The economics and finance were very helpful to build a foundation.”

That helped Gupta not only in her initial job hunt, but also when she was moving up the career ladder. She cited her UTampa experience with in-person projects and learning data literacy as something that forced her out of her comfort zone in an ultimately valuable way. “That trains you for being on the job,” Gupta said.

Gupta’s interactions with peers and customers at Apple center on building privacy-first, trust-driven data systems. Considering the ongoing expansion of AI utilization across industries, Gupta coordinates her efforts with individual company needs.

“Companies see AI as an enabler, but everybody is on the fence,” Gupta said. “How do we use these systems? ‘Responsible AI’ is the buzz I hear everywhere.”

Both in-class lessons and internship experiences via UTampa enabled Gupta to help answer such questions. She completed a summer internship through GTE Financial while she was enrolled in the University’s MBA program. “If you use that career experience UTampa provides, you can get into the tech companies,” Gupta said. “In that GTE Financial internship, I had full autonomy over the system they wanted to build. These companies help shape you as a person.”

Roughly a decade later, Gupta was on the other side of the equation, going from summer intern to speaker and meeting students at the Global AI Summit. “I interacted with so many students,” she said. “I saw so much of myself in them. That is exactly where I was 10 years ago.”