Chakraborty’s remarkable story shapes MS BAnDS program from founding to his retirement
Tuesday, April 28, 2026
Media Contact: Hallie Hart | Communications Coordinator | 405-744-1050 | hallie.hart@okstate.edu
Dr. Goutam Chakraborty remembers the soft glow of the kerosene lamp in his childhood home.
His father studied. Without sunlight or electricity, the lantern illuminated his handwritten notes.
A survivor of the refugee crisis catalyzed by the 1947 Partition of India, Chakraborty’s father had fled to Calcutta, where he met Chakraborty’s mother. Both parents modeled determination for their three sons, obtaining degrees through night school to support the family.
“It’s something I fundamentally believe in,” Chakraborty said. “Education is the way out, and I saw that through my own eyes.”
Chakraborty’s studies began inside his family’s thatched house in a place he describes as a refugee colony or squatters’ settlement.
“Basically, people just built whatever they could on an open space of land,” Chakraborty said.
Today, one of Chakraborty’s brothers is a lawyer, and the other is a doctor in India.
Chakraborty, the ever-curious adventurer, chose a winding path.
More than 8,000 miles from where he grew up, he left his indelible stamp on a business school’s graduate curriculum. Chakraborty spent decades as a steady champion for students, launching them into high-profile careers while teaching the values that guided him along his remarkable journey.
The legend
Sitting behind his desk in Oklahoma State University’s Business Building, Chakraborty pondered a good dilemma.
How would he pack all of the awards?
Rows of heavy plaques covered the professor’s fourth-floor office wall, with honors ranging from two Regents Distinguished Teaching Awards (1997 and 2011) to the 2013 SAS Distinguished Professor Award.
That’s a lot of hardware to haul to sunny Florida, where Chakraborty is moving after 35 years in the Spears School of Business.
The longtime director of OSU’s acclaimed Master’s in Business Analytics and Data Science (MS BAnDS) program will retire June 1. He is involved with the new director’s search while Regents Professor Dr. Ramesh Sharda, a fellow legend in the Business Building, will lead the program in the interim.
Chakraborty, whose desk features a nameplate reading “CHAOS COORDINATOR,” poured decades of passion into the program until he had confidence to pass the baton.
The decision was not easy.
“This is my baby, in many ways, and I’ve let it grow,” Chakraborty said.
The baby matured into a superstar.
As of 2025, Chakraborty’s MS BAnDS program ranked No. 2 nationally behind only Harvard University, according to Fortune.com. Between the graduate certificate and full-fledged degree, more than 2,000 students have graduated from the program.
The job placement rate, which hovers close to 100%, is one of Chakraborty’s proudest accomplishments.
“That was the primary goal,” Chakraborty said. “I do believe that we need to do whatever we can to put the student in a situation where he or she can get a good, meaningful job.”
Using enterprise-level analytics software, Chakraborty and MS BAnDS faculty instill a strong technical foundation in each student.
Perhaps more importantly, the director emphasizes problem-solving and people skills that extend outside the classroom.
“From Day 1, he helped us with our resume and our networking skills,” said Carol Antony, a May 2025 MS BAnDS graduate who works as a data scientist for Walmart. “He prioritized what he knew was most relevant.”
Chakraborty encourages students to stay curious and learn about the world for themselves.
Career paths usually aren’t linear. Their wise mentor knows.
The scholar
Chakraborty solemnly swears his long-term career in academia began by mistake.
It’s true, but his early education was a deliberate path toward opportunity.
He mirrored the dedication he saw in his parents throughout turbulent years in the bustling city of Calcutta, India, today known by its Bengali name of Kolkata.
Chakraborty’s paternal relatives were landholders in present-day Bangladesh, but chaos ensued before his birth.
After nearly two centuries of colonialism in India, Great Britain drew borders in a rush to demarcate India and Pakistan in 1947. The Partition of India suddenly displaced millions of people from their homes, and conflict broke out as millions died.
Chakraborty’s father left for Calcutta, West Bengal, India, with five younger siblings and Chakraborty’s grandmother. They had to build a new life.
In the 1960s, Chakraborty spent his early childhood in a house with a tin roof and no concrete or electricity. He remembers his mother once waking him because a storm tore the family’s makeshift roof off in the night. During his fifth-grade year, the house was reconstructed as a brick home with electricity, but there was no running water until a few years later.
While attending school and raising the family, his parents had to balance multiple jobs.
Over time, with additional degrees, his mother built a career in accounting while his father became an assistant commissioner of sales taxes.
Education opened doors for the children, too.
After graduating from high school in 1975, Chakraborty earned his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur.
Although he saw potential for a lucrative job, a couple of years in industry showed him it wasn’t the right fit, so he returned to school while working. Chakraborty obtained his executive MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta and launched his marketing career with British American Tobacco in India.
He had a comfortable life.
Four years passed.
“Then, I got bored,” Chakraborty said.
Always restless for a new endeavor, Chakraborty applied to MBA programs in the United States. To his disappointment, preeminent universities accepted him but offered no scholarship money.
Although he had worked long enough to save some Indian rupees, Chakraborty couldn’t go without scholarships.
Then, the University of Iowa made the grand “mistake.”
After reviewing his application, Iowa determined Chakraborty couldn’t be an MBA student.
He already had an MBA in India. Given his credentials, a Ph.D. must be a better fit.
Chakraborty couldn’t believe it. The young businessman didn’t see himself as a professor, but when Iowa offered a full scholarship and fellowship, he took a chance.
The innovator
In India, Chakraborty lived in a metropolitan area home to about 14 million people.
Iowa is home to about 13 million acres of corn.
When Chakraborty arrived in Iowa City as a new Ph.D. student in 1986, he wondered if the whole journey was a mistake, let alone his admission to the program.
“I look around, and I don’t see anything other than farmland,” Chakraborty said. “What is this? Where are the people?”
Soon, Chakraborty found the people, and the Midwest won him over. He stayed at Iowa long enough to not only earn his Ph.D. in marketing and marketing research, but also add a master’s degree in statistics.
As a fresh Ph.D. graduate, Chakraborty landed four university job offers, including OSU. The business faculty left a positive impression on him during his campus visit, but he didn’t tell them when he made a second trip to Oklahoma.
Driving nine lonely hours from Iowa City, Chakraborty wanted to find out about Stillwater for himself.
What were the apartments and rental homes like? Where did young academics go for coffee? He met students who could paint a realistic picture of the town, free from marketing strategies OSU might use to sway his decision.
Chakraborty liked what he heard.
In 1991, he chose OSU.
“Never thought of leaving,” Chakraborty said. “It gave me a very stable platform by being here continuously.”
Academically and personally, Chakraborty’s world evolved over 35 years.
The internet, smartphones and social media reshaped college marketing courses. His office moved to a new Business Building.
His sons, Deven and Ian, grew from infants to Stillwater High School graduates to college-educated professionals in data science and aerospace engineering, respectively. Chakraborty often traveled back to India to see his home city growing, too.
Through it all, Spears Business anchored Chakraborty and his active, inquisitive mind.
“Whenever I saw technology changing, whenever I saw new things happening, I could change on the fly,” Chakraborty said. “The university and the Spears School, from Day 1, have given me the complete freedom to do it.”
No example is more significant than the MS BAnDS program.
Around the turn of the millennium, Chakraborty started offering database marketing and data mining courses. Many students funneled into these classes from now-retired Spears Business professor Dr. Meg Kletke’s management information systems courses.
Seeing this natural pipeline, Chakraborty and Kletke led the creation of the graduate certificate in 2004 that preceded the MS BAnDS program. Spears Business partnered with SAS®, a leading provider of data analysis and data mining software. By 2019, the official MS BAnDS program launched, fusing marketing with data science and MIS.
Chakraborty synthesized his skills – problem-solving from engineering, business principles from marketing, data analysis from his statistics degree – to build an interdisciplinary program difficult to find anywhere else.
"It’s something I fundamentally believe in. Education is the way out, and I saw that through my own eyes.”
Younger son Ian Chakraborty said he admires his father’s “astronomical” work ethic, a key to the program’s success. Ian also noticed his father’s kindness in taking students under his wing, particularly international students facing the extra challenge of studying and living far from home.
Chakraborty provided a safe space.
“It completely changes their lives the way that his life changed when he came here,” Ian said. “Being able to take that chance on people and give them that opportunity to do great things, and then they all succeed – it’s really one of the most tangible outcomes of what he’s done here.”
The father
Every year, the MS BAnDS program hosts a Corporate Advisory Board meeting.
Business executives, including alumni, gather with Chakraborty and MS BAnDS faculty to guide the program’s continued development.
On April 23, his last meeting before retirement, the director was greeted with a surprise.
The board announced the establishment of the Dr. Goutam Chakraborty Scholarship for MS BAnDS students. It honors Chakraborty’s belief in the power of accessible education, as well as his personal impact on thousands of scholars.
Wearing his signature flat cap, glasses and tie, the man known as “Dr. C” has been the face of the MS BAnDS program from the beginning.
Sharda, the soon-to-be interim director and Chakraborty’s longtime friend, understands why.
“Dr. C has treated all his students as his children,” Sharda said. “He not only derives pleasure in their success, but he also takes personal responsibility for his students’ success. This level of commitment to students has been unique with Goutam. No wonder he is revered by most of his students and treated like a family member.”
Sharda said Chakraborty critiqued students like a father would. Blunt, yet fair and compassionate, he challenged them to reach their potential.
Chakraborty’s competitive spirit spread to the numerous students who won awards at business analytics competitions. Antony, one of multiple alumni to win the prestigious Disney Data and Analytics Women Award, said Chakraborty constantly emailed students about award opportunities and prompted them to apply.
“He really cared about us making that impact outside of the program, so that definitely helped,” Antony said. “I probably wouldn’t even have been thinking about the Disney award if it weren’t for him.”
After graduation, many alumni have invited Chakraborty to their weddings and sent him their children’s birth announcements.
They know Chakraborty’s family, too.
“This was a very common theme throughout our childhood where, obviously, he maintains a connection with a lot of his students for decades,” said elder son Deven Chakraborty. “And, somebody who met me when I was a toddler will come up and say hello. That speaks to just how far back his network and his career goes.”
Education, while essential, isn’t the sole component of Chakraborty’s mentorship. His impact shines through the MS BAnDS program’s I-CARE motto: Integrity, Curiosity, Accountability, Responsibility and Empathy.
On April 24, the day after the MS BAnDS Corporate Advisory Board meeting, Chakraborty walked to the stage and faced an audience of more than 200 people in the Wes Watkins Center for International Trade Development.
Numerous MS BAnDS students and alumni gathered for OSU’s 15th annual SAS® Analytics Day, an invitation-only business and analytics conference. Looking out into the crowd of professionals he had mentored, Chakraborty gave his farewell speech.
He shared gratitude for his sons, who traveled from California to be there, and his wife, Nivedita. He referred to his students as “extended family.”
Chakraborty also told his life story. Although some had heard it before, many had not.
Each step of his journey – studying beside a hurricane lamp in Calcutta, moving to Iowa City for his Ph.D. program and spending 35 years in Stillwater – shaped the values he instilled in graduates.
Chakraborty’s voice boomed through the microphone with confident vulnerability.
Generations of students – his extended family – listened together.