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Alumni Spotlight: Lifelong Learning

From emailing brands as a kid to becoming a founding product designer, Rhythm Gauba (Master of Integrated Innovation for Products & Services ‘25) shares how interdisciplinary education and lifelong learning continue to shape her career.

Building a product from scratch requires more than great design. It demands the ability to navigate ambiguity and make thoughtful tradeoffs. Rhythm Gauba (MIIPS '25), Founding Product Designer at Clarity RCM, embraces that challenge, driven by a belief that the best designers never stop learning.

Upon reflection, Rhythm realized that her passion for design had always been an integral part of her identity, even before she recognized it as a potential career. As a child, she would email companies with suggestions for enhancing their customer experience. What began as mere curiosity was actually an early instinct to envision better solutions.

This curiosity led her to major in Humanizing Technology at, where she built a strong foundation in human-centered design and creative technology.

"My undergraduate experience was incredibly enriching," Rhythm shared. "It helped me build the skills to understand people and solve problems. Once I started working, I realized that great ideas alone aren’t enough. You need to understand business, engineering, and the perspectives of your teammates, not just the needs of the users."

It was during her time at Axis Bank–Freecharge that Rhythm began to understand the interconnected nature of building products at scale. While she advocated for user needs, teammates with different professional backgrounds asked questions about profit and feasibility or pushed her to clarify the main priority behind these solutions.

This got Rhythm thinking:

"There are so many different skills to learn from the people you work with. I wanted to understand how different people think and how ideas move from concept to reality. My goal was to remain a creative problem solver while developing the ability to contribute across the entire product journey."

Rhythm, inspired to continue her education, began researching graduate programs that offered both interdisciplinary courses and students with a wide array of professional backgrounds. Determined to learn from everything and everyone around her, Rhythm found that the Master of Integrated Innovation for Products & Services (MIIPS) at Carnegie Mellon was the perfect program to study at the intersection of engineering, design, and business. 

The MIIPS program and its collaborative courses encouraged Rhythm to think more deliberately about the type of work she wanted to pursue. In the course "Figure It Out: Your Professional Identity and Story," she collaborated with professors from organizations like McKinsey, who introduced her to a career model canvas. This canvas is similar to a business model canvas but is designed to help navigate one's career trajectory. Through this experience, Rhythm discovered her interest in a founding role at a startup that would allow her to take on a range of responsibilities, stay close to the problem, and have a high level of ownership over her work.

Looking back, Rhythm also credits the MIIPS program with making her bolder. 

"I think with MIIPS, you get the confidence that whatever the problem may be, you can figure it out. That’s something I really appreciate about the program," she reminisced.

Rhythm recalled many fond memories from her time at the Integrated Innovation Institute. Still, her favorite was graduation day, when she addressed the cohort, professors, and her family, who traveled to Pittsburgh from India, as the MIIPS commencement speaker.

Now working at Clarity RCM, a medical billing company that works with independent dermatology practices across the United States, Rhythm is reimagining a space that has long been complex and fragmented. 

She is working on revenue-related experiences ranging from front-desk teams and practice managers to patients and internal operations teams, ensuring each part works together as part of a larger ecosystem. She is particularly interested in using more quantitative data to strengthen design decisions. One of her favorite parts of working at a startup is the ability to stay close to the impact of her work and continuously iterate based on what she learns.

Rhythm sees this as an exciting time to be building, especially as AI continues to reshape how products are built. She has been actively developing her own AI workflows to take away repetitive, time-consuming tasks and create more space for the work that truly matters: understanding problems and making thoughtful decisions.

"A team that can adapt to a new way of working will always be around."

That same mindset shapes how Rhythm thinks about the future of design. As roles continue to evolve and the boundaries between designer, engineer, and builder become more fluid, she believes designers have an opportunity to expand their impact.

"In a world where everyone has access to the same tools, a designer’s edge comes from the depth of understanding they bring to the problem. The real work is immersing yourself in workflows, learning from subject matter experts, and uncovering the needs and constraints that help you decide what is worth solving, and then going at it. With AI accelerating the path from idea to execution, designers now have the ability to close the loop."

Rhythm believes the future belongs to comb-shaped builders: people who develop depth across multiple disciplines while strengthening their core craft. This mindset of continuous learning has remained a guiding principle throughout her career.