The pandemic delayed Urvin Desai’s return to school. So he started teaching

Between the constant emails, Facebook-like features, and the stress of resumé comparisons, it’s easy to see LinkedIn as a chore. Faced with free time during the pandemic, and believing in the power of community and education, Urvin Desai saw educational potential in it.

Desai, now a master’s student at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences, embraced LinkedIn’s computer science community and its learners. By the time he arrived in Boston in September 2021, he’d spent months educating others through video lectures, collaborations, and interview sessions.

“It was all new,” Desai said. “I was a student teaching the public.”

Urvin Desai

Desai began his computer science journey several years ago, as an eager high schooler in India. He enjoyed it immediately, particularly because his professors began the instruction from scratch.

“It was something completely new,” he recalled. “Once you start, it doesn’t stop. It felt like home.”

After obtaining his undergraduate degree in computer science, Desai worked as a software developer at NTT Data Services, an IT service management company. But as he watched his colleagues and friends pivot to graduate studies, he decided to join them. A colleague turned him on to the idea of studying abroad, and Desai’s extensive research brought Northeastern into focus.

“I was interested, and I thought, ‘Why not dive deeper?’ This will help me learn a lot of things I won’t learn by working,” Desai said. “I saw the research that was going on, and co-op was the major highlight.”

Like many international admits in 2020, Desai faced pandemic-related visa holdups. He deferred his start date to September 2021 and plugged the gap with short-term internships.

Before then, Desai had used LinkedIn the same way most people do: he’d update his profile and that was about it.

“As soon as I deferred, I got time and thought, ‘Why not network?’” he remembered. “Instead of sending random annoying messages, I posted some technical and motivation-related things. People saw that and my followers increased.”

The student becomes the teacher

Networking can be its own goal, but Desai had bigger plans. During his time as a volunteer mentor at iNeuron—an AI-oriented product developer and education platform—he and his colleagues had taught computer science concepts in marathon video sessions to about one thousand students.

“I taught data and business analytics on weekends,” said Desai, who also did project work for iNeuron. “Even to people with 15 or 20 years of professional experience, I would teach them SQL, Power BI, Tableau, statistics, Python.”

Desai’s SQL lessons, totaling almost four hours of material, have garnered 22,000 views on YouTube since the spring of 2021. He also did two collaborative sessions with iNeuron founder Krish Naik, who clocks in at more than half a million YouTube subscribers.

The iNeuron students became a treasure trove of LinkedIn connections for Desai, whose profile now registers nearly 7,000 followers. In addition, he created a LinkedIn group for Northeastern students and reached out to his fellow incoming Huskies individually.

With his LinkedIn footprint large enough to attract speakers and an audience, Desai pivoted to one-on-one sessions—combination interviews and discussions—with industry professionals. The first was an hour-long session with Daliana Liu, an Amazon data scientist Desai had connected with on the website.

Desai and his speakers always have topics and questions in mind. But he also surveys his attendees ahead of time to hear what they are interested in hearing.

“If the topic is vague or the students aren’t interested in it, there is no use in doing it,” he explained. “After the session, I provided another survey asking what things I should improve. Because I’d never done this before.”

“It was quite weird,” he added, “but that experience helped me. I learned public speaking. I’m more confident talking to people now.”

His next session was with Mark Freeman, a data scientist at software company Humu. They discussed Freeman’s projects, searching and interviewing for data science jobs, and how to succeed in those jobs.

“He went from health care to being a data science student,” Desai said of Freeman. “So explaining his journey was really motivating to people from different backgrounds.”

WATCH: Data Science Talks with Urvin Desai (YouTube)

Initially, Desai would connect with people, get to know them and their work, and ask to hold a session once the friendship had formed. Now, he says, he doesn’t even need to ask.

“They come to me,” he said, citing the example of Lending Tree data analyst Eric Sims. “I like interacting with people, and when they reach out themselves, it feels great, like I’m on the right track.”

Lessons from industry and academia

Other things have gotten easier too. Desai’s arrival in Boston from India lessened the time zone challenges of coordinating with US-based speakers and attendees. After chatting with Khoury College’s Seattle-based Business and Outreach Director Mary Trimarco, Desai sent an official email about his sessions to Khoury’s current and incoming students. He also reached out individually to hundreds of students from other Northeastern colleges, aiming to build on the 100 or so attendees he’s gotten for each session so far (additional students ask for recordings later).

Throughout, he’s kept a consistent vision of who he wants to talk to and why, a vision strikingly reminiscent of the co-op ethos that attracted him to Northeastern. He wanted to supplement the academia-derived knowledge of Khoury College’s professors with the industry-derived knowledge of working professionals.

The session experience certainly helps Desai in another of his endeavors, as he is now a TA for the same Khoury College “Database Management Systems” course he took online while still in India. He forged a strong connection with his professor, Martin Schedlbauer, who encouraged him to apply.

“It’s good interacting with the students and getting to know their approaches and points of view,” Desai said of his TA role. “I enjoy talking with people and learning new things.”

These lessons ought to serve him well on his first co-op, which Desai plans to do this year ahead of an expected 2023 graduation. He’s interested in being a business or data analyst, one who blends marketing with the central theme of his instructional pursuits: explaining important concepts to interested parties.

Before the pandemic, he was just a student. When the pandemic hit, he became a teacher. Now, he gets to be both.

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