Expanding Skills and Broadening Opportunities
Sayantika Pal, MS’25, information systems, after gaining valuable work experience after completing her bachelor’s degree, was looking to broaden her career opportunities and advance her skill set as an engineer. With the technology industry growing and new, innovative technological advancements emerging, Pal was ready to join a master’s program that would prepare her to embark on a new career path.
Sayantika Pal is a current student in the MS in information systems program. She earned her bachelor’s degree in electronics and telecommunication engineering from Mumbai University, India. Pal began her career as a software engineer at a product-based company, where she gained hands-on experience in building and maintaining large-scale insurance applications. She later transitioned to a consultancy firm, continuing to work with the same product suite. This role enabled her to deepen her domain knowledge and further strengthen her technical expertise.
However, while the experience provided her with valuable industry exposure, Pal realized that working in a product-based setup often limited her to a narrow tech stack and domain. To expand her skill set, explore emerging technologies and position herself for broader career opportunities, she decided to pursue a master’s degree in information systems.
Northeastern University stood out to Pal for its experiential learning opportunities, the wide range of strong technical courses and the flexibility to tailor the MS in information systems program to her interests. The availability of SDE and data-focused courses, coupled with her interest in building scalable systems and the growing demand for data-driven roles, aligned perfectly with her goal of pursuing a career in full-stack data engineering and expanding both the depth and breadth of her software engineering expertise. The academic projects she completed as part of these courses provided valuable practical experience, allowing her to apply theoretical concepts in practice and highlight her technical skills. Additionally, through Northeastern’s co-op program, she was able to build a strong professional network and gain exposure to international work cultures, which has been invaluable for her career growth.
Courses like “Program Structures and Algorithms”, taught by Adjunct Professor Jagadeesh Vasudevamurthy, were particularly valuable, especially because of the LeetCode-style DSA assignments, which became a major highlight during her co-op interviews. Similarly, “Network Structures and Cloud Computing”, taught by Adjunct Professor Tejas Parikh, provided her with a solid foundation in building cloud infrastructures, and developing and deploying cloud-native web applications, which proved invaluable in her co-op projects.
In addition, Pal served as a teaching assistant under Professor Amuthan Arulraj for the course “Web Design and User Experience”. This role allowed her to mentor students, assist in course delivery and gain valuable experience in teaching and academic support, further strengthening her overall profile.
Pal secured a co-op at Fidelity Investments as a software data engineer. During her co-op, she collaborated closely with a diverse team of developers, delivery leads, data quality and operation specialists and business users, gaining exposure to multiple projects. Some key highlights included building web scraping solutions using Python and automation frameworks like Playwright and designing data pipelines to ingest data into Snowflake tables using Snowpipes. Implementing an Anomaly Detection System using time series forecasting models and testing it across 3,000+ metrics datasets. Performing data extraction and transformation using automation tools and Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Gemini Pro. As well as redesigning and enhancing an existing web scraping platform using Python, Playwright, integrating Apache Kafka for real-time data streaming and pipeline scalability.
These projects provided Pal with hands-on experience across various aspects of full-stack data engineering, combining web scraping automation, data pipelines, predictive modeling and modern AI-driven workflows. The co-op program was instrumental in shaping her career, offering first-hand exposure to modern technologies, a global professional environment, guidance in navigating diverse workplace cultures and opportunities to build a strong professional network that continues to support her growth.
Pal secured her co-op by applying through NUworks and LinkedIn, strategically using targeted filters to focus on roles aligned with her skills and interests. For each domain, whether software development or data engineering, she tailored her resume to highlight relevant projects, integrate role-specific keywords and emphasize experiences demonstrating her technical expertise. She is extremely grateful to her co-op advisors, Giuseppina Cucciniello and Jessica Fisher, for preparing her for the professional world and guiding her through portfolio building, networking and career development.
Projects and Innovations
One of Pal’s most impactful group projects was “Care2Share”, a progressive web application designed to connect individuals with surplus food to NGOs working to reduce hunger. Built on the MERN stack, the platform integrates features like surplus food postings, NGO event management, blogging and donations.
Individuals can post surplus food with metadata such as quantity, type, location and expiry, while NGOs can claim listings for distribution. All transactions, volunteer sign-ups and donations are stored in MongoDB, enabling analytics on availability, distribution patterns and user engagement. The platform also implements REST APIs, automated notifications and map integration for optimized operations.
A key challenge was handling real-time data reliably while keeping the system scalable. This was addressed through modular backend services, Redux and React Hooks for frontend state management and robust data validation. Additionally, multilingual support was integrated with i18n to ensure consistency across locales.
Care2Share has strong real-world potential, helping communities minimize food waste, channel resources efficiently and increase volunteer participation. Its extensible architecture could expand beyond food to include surplus clothing or supplies, strengthening community welfare networks.
Future Perspective
Pal aims to pursue full-stack data engineering roles, focusing on building end-to-end data solutions that leverage cloud infrastructure, GenAI and other modern technologies. Her work includes developing secure and scalable web applications, designing and maintaining data pipelines, implementing ETL/ELT processes, optimizing data storage and retrieval, ensuring data quality and governance, working with streaming and batch processing frameworks and applying analytics and machine learning models to generate actionable insights. Her goal is to build scalable, intelligent, cloud-native data platforms that seamlessly integrate modern technologies across the entire data lifecycle.
Pal’s Northeastern journey taught her the importance of starting with a clear plan given the program’s shorter, intensive format. By strategically selecting courses every semester, which are aligned with her target role, she gained relevant technical skills, while at the same time built a strong GitHub portfolio through academic projects. This step was a crucial factor in recruiters’ decisions. She has also learned that time to market is critical. It’s better to release the first version early than to delay in pursuit of perfection, as refinement can always follow. Pal is deeply grateful to her family, mentors and friends for their guidance and encouragement, and she values Northeastern’s inclusive, diverse and supportive community, which fostered both her personal and professional growth.