Anurekha Chakraborty

Hi, I am Anurekha.

India is a country where you are never too far from a language, a culture, or a context you have not encountered before. I grew up in that, and I have kept seeking it out. Working across environments where I did not always share the language with the people around me taught me to pay close attention, read people carefully, and find ways to connect that go beyond words. That is where a lot of my instincts as a communicator come from.

I studied Psychology at the University of Calcutta, and it turned out to be the most useful academic foundation I could have had for a career in communications: a way of understanding why people respond to some messages and not others, what different audiences actually need, and how to read a room before deciding what to say in it. Communications work, at its best, is applied psychology.

My career started in content and editorial for startups based out of Kolkata, then took me into government. I spent time at Meghalaya Basin Development Authority, a state government agency in the remote hills of northeast India, then at Invest India in Delhi, a federal agency under India's Ministry of Commerce and Industries, and in between at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in Kolkata, where I worked as Language and Brand Reviewer for the Deals Advisory line, managing editorial quality assurance and brand compliance across confidential M&A deliverables for UK-based clients, running production workflows across time zones, and supporting corporate communications.

In practice that meant working with grassroots tribal communities in the hills, senior executives and officials in the capital, and PwC's UK clients across time zones. Three very different environments. Each one taught me something the others simply could not have.

Then I left. After six years across those environments I moved to the United States to complete a Master of Science in Project Management at Northeastern University in Silicon Valley. Part of it was wanting formal training in work I had already been doing for years. Part of it was wanting to work alongside people from industries and parts of the world I had never encountered. And a big part of it was wanting to be here, in the Bay Area, close to the kind of work I had been watching from a distance for a long time.

I graduated in April 2026 with a 3.91 GPA, earned the CPS Leaders and Scholars Award, and was elected team lead or project manager in almost all the group projects across the program. I am now based in Oakland, California, and looking for my next chapter in communications and program management.

Outside of work, I am trained in Indian classical music, Rabindrasangeet, and Bharatanatyam, a classical dance form with more rules than most project plans.

I also tutored high school students in psychology for seven years back in India. Seven years of figuring out how to explain the same idea twelve different ways, reading when someone is lost before they say so, and finding the version of something that clicks for a particular kid. Patience, audience understanding, message adaptation, and knowing when to reframe something entirely. That is a lot of what communications work entails.