My MS CS Journey at Khoury College, Northeastern University
My first corporate job right after college, I was sitting at my desk, browsing through the internet aimlessly, as I was least interested working the JIRA tickets assigned to me. Coffee, green tea and occasional chats with my colleagues kept me going through my day. The other thing that kept me interested was reducing toil and automating work which was otherwise predominantly done manually by individuals. As months went by, my interest in working went down and down.
This prompted me to look at pursuing a Masters degree in Computer Science/Software Engineering. I was glad that I got into Khoury College (then, College of Computer and Information Science) at Northeastern. I had heard lots and lots about the course offerings, top notch professors and researchers and of-course the co-op opportunities at Khoury. I was very eager to begin my new journey of Grad school.
Cut to my first semester at Khoury. To be honest, it was quite hectic. The primary reason being, the education system in the United States is quite different from that in India. And I had taken two core (pretty consuming) courses in my first semester itself. That semester also put me through a self-realization check. It put me in the spectrum which made me realize I had so much to unlearn and relearn. The rest of the semesters were not as demanding as the first one, because I had accustomed myself with the education system here and also I went to classes prepared. While the professors and TA’s helped, I also took help of quite a few online resources for class prep. I even went on to be a TA for one of the core courses for the Grad Program. Being a TA helped me more than being a student because now I wasn’t just limited to learning for myself. But also to put the teaching material out there in a way where everyone else could understand it too.
Khoury College is known for its exceptional co-op program. I landed both my co-ops (at Energy Services Group and Venmo) from career fairs organized by Khoury college and Northeastern University. Those got me into the initial rounds of interviews at least. I learnt a lot (by lot, I mean, A LOT) during these co-ops. I made an exponential increase in the knowledge consumed, applications developed and put my in-class learnings into play at both my co-ops. It was at my co-ops that I realized the importance of the co-op program and why it is a big deal for students at Khoury. You get a chance to work with systems at scale, which you would otherwise not get a chance in academics. Let alone work, we don’t even think about scaling while writing code or developing applications. When I look back now, I had a different approach while working on school projects before and after I went on co-ops. Co-op experiences also helped me land my current role at Lenovo as a Site Reliability Engineer. I would term the the last two and a half years of my life as “The Exponential Learning Curve”
I have always been a part of student communities, extracurriculars and volunteering. Even during my Undergrad, I was an active member of the Students Council. Working as a volunteer for different events made me realize that we have a responsibility towards the community that we are a part of. And so, giving back has been an important part of my life. Even at Khoury College, I was associated with the Khoury Masters Student Council for 3 of my 4 semesters. I started as an Events Coordinator and eventually became the President of the Council. We organized a lot of social and technical events such as Co-op Panels, White Board sessions, Hackathons, Tech Talks, Social Networking events, Game Nights throughout the semester(s). Apart from the Council, there are a lot of clubs at Northeastern that you can be a part of, viz Girls who Code, Code4Community etc.
Finally, I would like to end this article by thanking my friends, professors, family, advisors and every person who played any part in me successfully completing my Masters Degree in Computer Science.
If you have any questions or want to reach out to me regarding anything relating to CS, cloud or Khoury College, please feel free do so at dedhia.d@northeastern.edu. I would be more than happy to answer your questions and help you out.
