Stanford student’s work helps bring career advice to students around the globe

Silicon Valley might be home to some of the world’s richest companies, but it also hosts some of the most innovative nonprofits and social impact organizations. Many of these groups are focused on using the tech expertise in the Bay Area for social good, and in 2019, four Stanford undergrads spent a quarter of their year helping realize those goals. 

This is the first of four Stanford University student stories that Endless supports the Cardinal Quarter fellows program. 

Neel Kishnani (Stanford Class of ‘21) of Palo Alto, CA, who’s studying computer science and education, utilized his time in the Cardinal Quarter program to help other students around the world get access to the high-quality career information and advice through his work with CareerVillage.

“I was able to work with careervillage.org on the software development team,” he says. “Their platform employs crowdsourcing by matching professionals with students to deliver great answers to the many questions young people have when entering academia or the workforce.”

Neel’s work was technical. He worked directly on the content recommendation team, modernizing the systems architecture to make the question-to-answerer matching protocol more accurate, with the goal to make the system more accurate and allow for each student's question to be answered by the best professional answerer. Neel’s work also included working within the large codebase of careervillage.org to update the existing data pipelines and system architecture to support machine learning models.  The work, Neel says, was meaningful in not only building skills, but guiding his own career goals. 

“Before doing this Computer Science and Social Good fellowship, I was unsure about whether or not I wanted to pursue a career in the technology industry. However, my faith in the technology industry’s ability to do good has been renewed.” After working alongside developers and other employees at CareerVillage that are genuinely passionate about helping students in need, he says he’s more confident there are opportunities to do sustainable and effective work within computer science. 

“I was inspired by my colleagues’ drive and passion for helping underserved children and will use the inspiration to seek out more opportunities to use my skills and expertise for good in the future.” 

On a more technical level, he added management commands and configurations to load data scientists' machine learning models into the existing system. Neel integrated these models and added unit tests to ensure his implementations were accurate. 

“I made significant changes to careervillage.org's system and documented my work so that the team that took the project on could proceed smoothly,” he says, “I can say with confidence that I learned a lot about tools used in industry-level programs and the basics of machine learning. I also learned about the invaluable skills of teamwork and communication throughout the course of this summer experience. I worked within a small team, but we all had very different roles. It was a great experience to be able to communicate and collaborate with all of them in a productive way.”

CareerVillage is working to democratize access to high-quality career advice for young people everywhere. At careervillage.org, Neel worked as a software engineering intern on a project that involved modernizing a question-to-answerer matching system to support machine learning models.