Alumni Newsletter

Interview with an Alumnus
By Jenny Sloan
On a rainy, sub-zero afternoon in the Alan Turing building,
I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing one of our
Mathematics Alumni, Rohana Gunawardena. Rohana began
his BSc Mathematics at The University of Manchester
in October 1984, and has since developed an impressive
career with some big names encompassing a vast geographical
arena.
Unlike many alumni (including myself), Rohana had a very
clear idea about what he wanted to do after his graduation
in 1987. He explains that after university he started working
‘in the consulting division at PwC, which was then called
Deloitte’. He worked as an Auditor for three years, before
moving on to Consultancy
within the same organisation.
This then led him to
another role in Consulting,
‘with Accenture, which was
then called Anderson Consulting’.
A clear interest and flair for
consulting can be tracked
from Rohana’s early graduate
career, so it may not be
surprising that he decided
to start up his own company, Exium Inc, ‘specialising in
providing high quality consultants for long term assignments’.
However, one of the main things that working as a
Principal Consultant within his own organisation taught him
was that one can ‘achieve more working with other people’.
Between 1997 and 2007, he worked with ‘several
different clients’, from Applied Materials to GTECH.
Indeed, in the Autumn of 2000, Rohana began working for
Applied Materials, and stayed with the company for more
than fifteen years. He worked on a project revolving around
‘SAP, which is a brand of German software’, and was
‘initially hired to work on SAP roll-out to Japan’. However,
the project ended up taking him to the USA, where he carried
out ‘consulting work on the East Coast’ for five years.
And the rest, as they say, is history. Rohana has been in
Northern California ever since, and has been working as
Director of SAP Practice with Quality Systems & Software
(‘a Business & Technology consulting firm with a special
focus on maximising EPR investment’) since June 2007.
While at university, Rohana was taught by lecturers such as
Peter Eccles and Francis Coghlan (pictured below, with Nige
Ray), and remembers his time at the University fondly. Besides
working for The Mancunion as a photographer and
enjoying membership of the squash team, he found his degree
to be stimulating and it allowed him to gain excellent
knowledge and skills. Rohana reveals that the day to day
principles and practices of Mathematics are not relevant
every day in his role. He laughs, ‘I’m not faced with algebra
or vectors on a daily basis’.
However, his degree is still pertinent in his current role,
primarily the ‘problemsolving’
he developed
throughout his degree. His
time studying Mathematics
at The University of Manchester
taught him to ‘not
be phased when [he] see[s]
something difficult’, and to
‘not be scared of Maths’ in
it’s shapeshifting forms,
which is, in Rohana’s case,
software. Indeed, he encourages
current Mathematics
students and alumni to be proud of what their
Mathematics degree has given or is giving them. ‘I would
expect anyone studying Mathematics to have strong technical,
mathematical and computing skills’ he explains, however
‘it’s the soft skills that they may need to work on’. Indeed,
these ‘soft skills’ have proved to be most beneficial
for advancing Rohana’s own career. He advises
‘communicating and understanding business problems
from the perspective of a business user’ are crucial for success.
Now based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Rohana’s interests
include ‘barbeque [which] is the major summer activity
now that [he] is a home owner’ and ‘sampling the best the
Bay Area has to offer’. He has also been the University’s
main contact for Northern Californian alumni for the past
five years, having helped to deliver ‘International Speaker
Series’ events in the San Francisco area. These involve a
particular academic investing a few hours one evening to
meet with alumni to deliver a presentation on their particular
area of research, while also distributing headline
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