The MSIT Mindset

The tech world Snehil Mathur (MSIT ‘18) joined in 2011 and returned to eight years ago when she graduated from Northwestern Engineering's Master of Science in Information Technology (MSIT) program was vastly different from the one she works in today.  

In 2018, technology felt fast. In 2026, it feels exponentially faster. It has moved from narrow AI to ambient intelligence, from 4G to ubiquitous 5G, from comparably slow digital adoption to global platforms reaching hundreds of millions of users. 

Despite that rapid evolution, Snehil, who is marketing manager for data and analytics at ServiceNow, said her MSIT degree remains not only relevant, but essential to her career success.

“What MSIT gave me wasn't a toolkit for a specific moment. It gave me a way of thinking,” she said. “The program trained me to be comfortable at the intersection of business and technology, which means that as tools change, my ability to navigate them doesn't waver.” 

That skillset led Snehil to a vital role with the cloud-based platform-as-a-service company.  

Snehil joined the company in September. Her current project seeks an answer that is something of a holy grail in marketing: How do you better target customers and drive adoption by ensuring the right message reaches the right person at the right time and in the right way?  

In pursuit of that answer, she learned to appreciate the difference between being an innovator and an inventor. The former iterates existing technology; the latter—the role that most excites her—creates new technology.  

“How much of this job is about invention rather than analysis is something I didn't see coming,” she said. “The project I'm currently focused on didn't have a template or a precedent. It was a blank page and a question worth answering.”  

The answer, at its core, is data. But data itself is often messy, unstructured, and useless until it is tamed.  

Snehil’s role at ServiceNow is to do the taming, providing structure to mine the data and identify an actionable narrative for the company’s marketing leadership.  

“There's something deeply satisfying about using data to find patterns, building a model iteratively, and watching it grow into something that creates real marketing impact,” she said. “Where that problem is taking me next is something I couldn't have imagined when I started.”  

That next step involves developing a predictive AI model that will help her and her colleagues go from identifying questions to anticipating them. 

"What I'm most proud of isn't any single stage of this build," Snehil said, "it's the fact that I started with a blank page, trusted that the answer lived somewhere in the data, and created something that simply didn't exist before." 

Snehil’s work is finding traction thanks to a process and mindset she formed in the MSIT program. She chose MSIT because she wanted to add business skills to her technical acumen.  

“MSIT felt designed for people like me: curious, cross-functional thinkers who didn't want to be siloed into one lane,” she said. “A program that trained you to think as both a strategist and a technologist felt rare and exactly right for where I wanted to go.”  

From MSIT, Snehil moved into roles as a senior data analyst and, ultimately, a lead data analyst with Advanced Auto Parts. She worked there for five-plus years before taking a career break. 

Now back in the tech world after a year-long maternity break, Snehil said the MSIT mindset is serving her well.   

“Growth is something you often only see clearly in hindsight,” she said. “I think about how I approach a problem today versus how I did years ago, and the difference is in the details. I ask sharper questions. I know when to dig in alone and when to pull people together. MSIT played a real role in shaping that.”