Like father, like daughter: The Vellankis take on UC Berkeley Haas together

Sahasra Vellanki, BS 29, is a UC Berkeley Haas Spieker undergraduate student double majoring in business and data science. Her father, Ravi Vellanki, just started the Executive MBA program, in the Class of 2028. Here’s her perspective on their journey to Haas.

“My dad and I have always been close. He’s my inspiration, and I was a total daddy’s girl growing up. Honestly, I never expected to end up at Berkeley, let alone have both of us here at the same time. I used to joke that I’d move to the East Coast for school and he’d see me twice a year. Instead, I ended up an hour from home (I was born and raised in San Jose, where my parents and sister still live). The joke now is that he couldn’t stand being apart from me, so he manifested me staying close by.

“I genuinely think I have the best dad in the world. Even when I mess up, no matter what aspect of life, he’s always the first person to give me solid advice, and I trust it completely because I know how smart and wise he is. Growing up, every sport and every extracurricular I threw myself into was partly to impress him. He loves cricket and actually played for a cricket club in the Bay Area before I was born.

“He stopped playing eventually as my sister and I grew up, but the love for the sport never left him, and he always pushed my sister and me to find a sport we were passionate about. That’s what led me to volleyball. His passion for the game somehow channeled into mine, and I played varsity volleyball all through high school as a libero (back-row defensive specialist), and so did my sister. Hopefully we inherited some of his athleticism.

“My dad’s career says a lot about who he is, too. He came to the U.S. completely on his own to get his Master’s in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Utah. No family here, no one to fall back on, just him, figuring out a new country while trying to build a future. From there, he built a career in the semiconductor industry, and today he’s at Lam Research, where he’s led the engineering behind ALTUS Halo, a tool that helps chipmakers build the next generation of memory and logic chips that power AI. Watching him build a life for himself like that from scratch, alone, in a new country, is something I’ve always looked up to.

“That drive rubbed off on me, too. I’m currently interning at Decart, an AI efficiency lab in San Francisco, and honestly, growing up watching my dad work hard shaped how I think about my own path. I look up to him so much that I’m always trying to measure up, to work the way he does, and build something he’d be proud of.

“Whenever someone asks my dad why he kept climbing in his career, he gives the same answer: because Saha asked him to. It started when I was about five. He’d come home from work, I’d come home from school, and he’d tell me about his day, his manager, what the next level looked like. I’d just say, ‘Dad, you should go for that. I want to see you get there.’ And he would. He always worked hard, but he says every step up came because his daughter asked him to take it.

“So I guess that’s how we got here. Sometime in October of my freshman year, I came home to visit (a whole hour away) and jokingly said, ‘Dad, imagine if you got your MBA from Berkeley, that would be so cool.’ Next thing I know, he’s putting together an application and sending it to me to review, since I got into Haas first after all. And now here we are—both Haasies.”