By all accounts, Alok Rishi is successful professionally; he works in Silicon Valley for Sun Microsystems as a software designer. Yet, he feels unsettled. He has earned one master’s degree already and doesn’t think more education is the answer.
Then, he hears a radio advertisement. The announcer talks of someone who is lost professionally, not able to put his finger on what exactly is missing, but who is restless all the same. “That’s me!” thinks Rishi. He then hears the words: “Carnegie Mellon.”
“I almost ran off the road right there!” he recalls. CMU and its robotics program had been his first choice for college, but he was unable to secure the funding. The program being advertised is for a Master of Science degree in software management at Carnegie Mellon in Silicon Valley (CMU-SV).
It’s 2007 when Rishi enrolls in the two-year, part-time program; by the end, thanks to the professors’ mentorship, and the real-life tutorials on how to handle venture capital interviews, Rishi says, he was able to create Yunteq, a cloud management company.
Just as CMU-SV is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, the 2009 alumnus is celebrating his entrepreneurial success: Yunteq was sold last year to Coraid, making him the first CMU-SV alumnus to have a company reach acquisition. Rishi and his team have continued on with Coraid, where he is now chief software architect for cloud orchestration—and, he adds, he is no longer restless.
He is just one of more than 600 alumni who have been a part of CMU-CV’s first decade. They each earned their graduate degrees in software engineering, software management, information technology, or electrical and computer engineering.
—Elizabeth Shestak (DC’03)
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