December 2025 SCIS & BAIS Student of the Month: Om Dobariya
The Penn State Smeal Center for Supply Chain Research (CSCR) is proud to highlight high-achieving students in Supply Chain and Information Systems (SCIS) and Business Analytics and Information Systems (BAIS) who are making an impact in their programs with a SCIS & BAIS Student of the Month award. These students are nominated by faculty leaders and selected by a panel of SCIS and BAIS faculty representatives and the CSCR Executive Director.
Om Dobariya is a fourth-year business analytics and information systems major from Surat, Gujarat in India. Nominated by faculty member Akhil Kumar, Om was chosen as the December SCIS & BAIS Student of the Month for his wide-ranging research, outside involvements, and dedication to his discipline in the classroom.What excites you about a career in business analytics?
There has always been an abundance of demand for professionals who can talk both in technical and business verbiage – something people in business analytics learn, and I am sure that the emergence of AI has nothing but augmented this need. As AI reshapes the industry, my BAIS education has prepared me to navigate this change by combining technical depth with business understanding.
Moreover, as someone who aspires to pursue a PhD in AI and Public Policy, I want to make as large a positive impact as I can make – by making AI fair and responsible. Even here, I have a technical subject (AI) intertwined with a social side (Public Policy), a combination I have always been exposed to in business analytics.
What internship or other analytics experience have you gained while at Penn State?
The summer following my first year (summer 2023), I was an Application Developer Intern at Stellar IT Solutions of Rockville, Maryland, where I developed the front-end of a parking app for one of the clients. The app had an authentication system, role-based access, and it provided users with real-time parking availability. I utilized Flutter and Java for that project.
In the summer of 2025, I mainly conducted research in the field of AI with BAIS professor Akhil Kumar. One of the main findings of the research was that ChatGPT 4o is unusually susceptible to minor changes in linguistic cues such as politeness. We concluded that rude prompts consistently outperformed polite ones in yielding higher accuracy for 4o.
What is your favorite part about being a BAIS student at Smeal?
Interdisciplinary is my favorite part of being a BAIS student at Smeal. I have always been a person of multi-domain thinking, and as discussed earlier, that is one of the core features of being a BAIS major. We have core business classes – Marketing, Finance, and Accounting – while learning data analytics, VBA, Python, and SQL.
What organizations are you involved in within Smeal and at Penn State?
Currently, I serve as the Vice President for MISA – Management Information Systems Association. As such, I help with programming various workshops educating members, such as MS Excel, SQL, and Tableau workshops.
How have Smeal and the SCIS/BAIS Department prepared you to make an impact outside the classroom?
Both Smeal and the SCIS/BAIS department have prepared me in many ways to make a positive impact outside of the classroom. Obviously, we have world-class classes being taught by stellar professors, but what stood out to me the most are the encouragement and the resources given to students by both Smeal and the department.
There have been times when I have felt devastated and directionless, for instance, when I got rejected from the Schreyer Honors College. But when I reached out to professors here, they helped me find my purpose and resources to fulfill it. Professor Saurabh Bansal immensely helped in terms of setting up my research agenda and finding a research supervisor. Professor Akhil Kumar taught me the know-how behind academic research and helped me navigate my post-graduate plan.
What is your favorite Penn State memory?
I have used Pattee and Paterno Library extensively for doing my work, and my favorite memory will be studying at my most-liked spots there. These spots include Schreyer Business Library, the Harry Potter reading room, and the ground-floor Paterno Starbucks.
What is your favorite creamery ice cream flavor?
This is indeed a tough question. I would say that ‘Happy-Happy Joy-Joy’ and ‘Butter Pecan’ are the strongest contenders.
