The Intersection of Business and Technology
Sourabh Kumar, MS’25, decided to complete his master’s degree in information systems to advance his career and get a better grasp of the business side of the technology industry. Now close to graduating from the program, Kumar has improved upon his understanding of business and the economic value of his engineering work.
Sourabh Kumar completed his bachelor’s degree in computer science. After gaining knowledge in computer science and technology, he was looking to learn more about the business side of the technology industry. He wanted to dive deeper into the intersection of engineering, business, and technology to expand his knowledge. Kumar was ready for a career transformation and knew Northeastern University’s information systems program was the key to unlocking his goals.
Kumar at his friend’s graduation.
Throughout his master’s program, there have been a couple of people who Kumar said have shaped his experience at Northeastern. Two fellow Northeastern students, Sneha Giranje and Rishabh Singh, have been a source of motivation and guidance for Kumar. As well as his parents, who have supported and encouraged him during his studies.
Co-op Experience
While choosing where to pursue his master’s degree, the co-op program at Northeastern University stood out to Kumar as a unique way to gain experience in the field. Kumar is currently completing his co-op at Arista Networks as a software engineer intern. His day-to-day role involves working on creating code for the company and participating in design discussions to help the team. At Arista, Kumar has gotten the opportunity to gain experience with new technologies that are useful to his career aspirations, such as Golang and the gRPC platform.
Kumar had two mentors while at his co-op, and he says they have been extremely useful for his career development and have impacted his work for the better. One mentor is a principal engineer, while the other is a software engineer, giving him the opportunity to know the ins and outs of each role to expand his knowledge of the field. Kumar has praised the other employees at Arista for being communicative and welcoming. Kumar and his co-workers were able to participate in a hackathon at Arista, which was a memorable moment in his experience. During the hackathon, they had to develop their own tool from scratch and give a presentation explaining their work and development process.
His experience thus far has been everything he hoped for. Kumar has been grateful to have access to a world of career development opportunities. Additionally, he has taken advantage of learning as much as he can about new technologies and platforms that are extremely useful in the current technology industry.
Classroom Opportunities
One course that Kumar said has prepared him the most for his career is the “Network Structures and Cloud Computing” course taught by Adjunct Professor Tejas Parikh. The course’s materials are updated to teach about tools and concepts that are currently being utilized in the tech industry today. Kumar appreciated the intricacy and difficulty of the assignments since he was able to directly apply the skills learned from them to his current role at his co-op. Professor Parikh’s class helped Kumar advance and improve his skills, and he is appreciative of the guidance and help from Professor Parikh throughout the class.
During this course, Kumar completed an independent project where he built a cloud-native authenticator tool; this tool that is used to authorize a person’s identity when logging onto a website, app, etc. Kumar built the entire tool (backend, user interface (UI) and entire infrastructure) from scratch using the Google Cloud Platform. Kumar has been proud of this project and all the work he put into building the tool.
Future Perspectives
Kumar is graduating from the Information Systems master’s program in the Fall of 2025. Kumar believes the program has prepared him to enter the technology industry with a firm understanding of both tech and business. He has enjoyed his co-op at Arista and hopes to pursue a similar career upon graduating. Kumar wanted to join a master’s program that would make him a well-rounded, competitive candidate in the job market. He believes the opportunities at Northeastern have given him the tools and confidence to enter the industry he is passionate about and build a prosperous career.