Alumni Newsletter
June-2016-Alumni-Newsletter
June-2016-Alumni-Newsletter
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Interview with an Alumnus<br />
By Jenny Sloan<br />
On a rainy, sub-zero afternoon in the Alan Turing building,<br />
I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing one of our<br />
Mathematics <strong>Alumni</strong>, Rohana Gunawardena. Rohana began<br />
his BSc Mathematics at The University of Manchester<br />
in October 1984, and has since developed an impressive<br />
career with some big names encompassing a vast geographical<br />
arena.<br />
Unlike many alumni (including myself), Rohana had a very<br />
clear idea about what he wanted to do after his graduation<br />
in 1987. He explains that after university he started working<br />
‘in the consulting division at PwC, which was then called<br />
Deloitte’. He worked as an Auditor for three years, before<br />
moving on to Consultancy<br />
within the same organisation.<br />
This then led him to<br />
another role in Consulting,<br />
‘with Accenture, which was<br />
then called Anderson Consulting’.<br />
A clear interest and flair for<br />
consulting can be tracked<br />
from Rohana’s early graduate<br />
career, so it may not be<br />
surprising that he decided<br />
to start up his own company, Exium Inc, ‘specialising in<br />
providing high quality consultants for long term assignments’.<br />
However, one of the main things that working as a<br />
Principal Consultant within his own organisation taught him<br />
was that one can ‘achieve more working with other people’.<br />
Between 1997 and 2007, he worked with ‘several<br />
different clients’, from Applied Materials to GTECH.<br />
Indeed, in the Autumn of 2000, Rohana began working for<br />
Applied Materials, and stayed with the company for more<br />
than fifteen years. He worked on a project revolving around<br />
‘SAP, which is a brand of German software’, and was<br />
‘initially hired to work on SAP roll-out to Japan’. However,<br />
the project ended up taking him to the USA, where he carried<br />
out ‘consulting work on the East Coast’ for five years.<br />
And the rest, as they say, is history. Rohana has been in<br />
Northern California ever since, and has been working as<br />
Director of SAP Practice with Quality Systems & Software<br />
(‘a Business & Technology consulting firm with a special<br />
focus on maximising EPR investment’) since June 2007.<br />
While at university, Rohana was taught by lecturers such as<br />
Peter Eccles and Francis Coghlan (pictured below, with Nige<br />
Ray), and remembers his time at the University fondly. Besides<br />
working for The Mancunion as a photographer and<br />
enjoying membership of the squash team, he found his degree<br />
to be stimulating and it allowed him to gain excellent<br />
knowledge and skills. Rohana reveals that the day to day<br />
principles and practices of Mathematics are not relevant<br />
every day in his role. He laughs, ‘I’m not faced with algebra<br />
or vectors on a daily basis’.<br />
However, his degree is still pertinent in his current role,<br />
primarily the ‘problemsolving’<br />
he developed<br />
throughout his degree. His<br />
time studying Mathematics<br />
at The University of Manchester<br />
taught him to ‘not<br />
be phased when [he] see[s]<br />
something difficult’, and to<br />
‘not be scared of Maths’ in<br />
it’s shapeshifting forms,<br />
which is, in Rohana’s case,<br />
software. Indeed, he encourages<br />
current Mathematics<br />
students and alumni to be proud of what their<br />
Mathematics degree has given or is giving them. ‘I would<br />
expect anyone studying Mathematics to have strong technical,<br />
mathematical and computing skills’ he explains, however<br />
‘it’s the soft skills that they may need to work on’. Indeed,<br />
these ‘soft skills’ have proved to be most beneficial<br />
for advancing Rohana’s own career. He advises<br />
‘communicating and understanding business problems<br />
from the perspective of a business user’ are crucial for success.<br />
Now based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Rohana’s interests<br />
include ‘barbeque [which] is the major summer activity<br />
now that [he] is a home owner’ and ‘sampling the best the<br />
Bay Area has to offer’. He has also been the University’s<br />
main contact for Northern Californian alumni for the past<br />
five years, having helped to deliver ‘International Speaker<br />
Series’ events in the San Francisco area. These involve a<br />
particular academic investing a few hours one evening to<br />
meet with alumni to deliver a presentation on their particular<br />
area of research, while also distributing headline<br />
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