Last summer, recent graduate Roshni Mirchandani combined her entrepreneurial spirit with a humanitarian calling.

As part of a field study program for the Social Enterprise Institute in South Africa, she served as a business consultant for local entrepreneurs and micro-enterprises.

Helping impoverished business owners achieve success, she said, shaped her career goals.

“I want to change other people’s lives as much as I can,” said Mirchandani, BA’11, who begins working for Teach for America in Rhode Island this fall.

Teach For America selects college graduates who are promising future leaders to teach for two years in low-income communities throughout the United States. The goal is to expand educational opportunity and eliminate educational inequities.

Mirchandani’s experiential learning opportunity in South Africa guided her down a path toward a career in education. But President Obama’s State of the Union speech in January, in which he urged college graduates to consider teaching, finalized her decision.

Listening to Obama’s speech, Mirchandani said, “was an eye-opening moment.”

At Northeastern, Mirchandani had a never-ending passion to explore new challenges and opportunities. For example, she blogged and tweeted on co-op at HubSpot, an Internet marketing firm based in Cambridge, Mass. Using social media to follow up with the company about the job, she said, played a pivotal role in landing the coveted co-op position.

Mirchandani hopes to use her leadership experiences at Northeastern to carve out a career in business. She served as president of UTSAV — a student organization that promotes South Asian awareness and cultural diversity — and as a leadership scholar and leadership consultant through the LEAD 360 program. LEAD 360 is a component of Northeastern’s experiential learning model that uniquely prepares students to lead in a complex global society.

“In the future, I’d like to start my own business,” said Mirchandani, “but I want to make sure it’s having an impact on people’s lives as well.”