I work as a software engineer working with a lot of the largest banks in the world to streamline how much work it takes for international payments and make it more automated.
What is your favorite part about your current occupation/position?
I like knowing how much money flows out of the US into other countries through the work I've done. I grew up in India and I've seen how absolutely transformative the inflows of foreign money have enabled growth in a lot of the developing world as more countries get to sit at the table of global finance.
How did you get to where you are now (education, internship, mentors, chance encounters, etc.)?
Meeting the right friends and roommates at UIUC was the biggest impact, and there's no way I could have predicted how it would go even if it feels obvious in hindsight. One of my summer roommates was working at this research lab I visited a few times and asked if I could join, three years later I had worked on several published papers and learned so much about HCI where I got to combine statistics, computer science and psychology.
Some of my friends were signing up to be course assistants of my intro cs class because we had a good time, I said why not, and ended up working for the class for 3 years till I was head course assistant and could leave a lasting impact as we massively overhauled the class over covid.
What aspects of your Illinois education have been most beneficial to your career?
Honestly the homework. A lot of the famously busy classes like CS 341, STAT 410, and CS 225+233 combo had me really learn concepts beyond just the surface level in a way that I can still recall so much of what I did and each of them left me a wiser person than when I started.
What advice would you give to current students about the professional realm?
If you're looking towards software engineering, spend a lot of time practicing interviews with realistic conditions (mock interviews, timers, not spamming answers), carefully analyzing specific weak areas and getting a broad scope of the topics involved. My friends and I wrote a small guide around this: tinyurl.com/cs-interview-prep
Learning more about databases, large scale data processing, modelling, numerical methods, complexities of distributed systems, profiling and estimation will go a long way and Illinois has lots of classes on these topics that I learned a lot from.
What did you enjoy about being a student at the University of Illinois? What was your favorite place, thing, or activity while on campus?
My time at UIUC was some of the best years of my life, and I liked every moment of it. The student population with thousands of people let me find exactly the type of people I always wanted to meet, even if younger me never realized I would thrive in this environment. The professors were a lot more friendlier and approachable than I realize, and I would just regularly hang around there and meet many more friends through them too. Campus being so walkable, transitable and having everyone near me was really nice and every day was constant amounts of socializing where homework and exams somehow got done.
Besides endlessly exploring the campus and walking for hours every day on average, I also loved going to savoy 16 for movies (via the 1 S bus). Despite covid being there for half my degree, I saw 14 different movies there with so many different groups of friends.
Besides hanging out with my friends, just walking and biking around campus was so nice
Any other details or fun facts that you would like to share:
Being a Statistics Ambassador is great! Definitely join in to have a positive impact in helping people adjusting to Illinois life, organizing events and exciting more people to major within Statistics.
Illinois is also unique in happily involving undergrads in the teaching sphere and not just leaving them stuck with grunt work or grading, but also impactful work like interacting with students, helping with curriculum and designing homework.