Information Technology Made Tangible:
A Software Engineer Took What He Learned From a Touro Program and Applied it Far and Wide

Fortune smiled brightly on software engineer Vimal Kumar in the form of both geography and a graduate school program. Kumar works at the UBS complex in New York City's leafy Madison Square Park neighborhood. As it happens, Touro's Graduate School of Technology (GST) was located in the same area, so Kumar received his master's in IT Project Management from GST in 2012.

It had been two years working as an IT guy for Credit Suisse (recently acquired by UBS) when Kumar, a software engineer with a master's degree from a university in India, began planning his next professional move. Remember, Kumar is an engineer: “Planning,” he explains wryly, “is in the genes.”

He credits the knowledge he gained at Touro's GST, and his own professional drive, for his current position as a vice president of information technology. He manages IT people and projects in-house and overseas, on everything from client-server networks to machine learning and generative AI-based applications. And he doesn't keep what he learned to himself. Kumar is proud to mentor and educate younger team members and colleagues.

“I learned so many things that I use every single day, taught by real professionals, not just bookish professors, but real people who are or were out here in the world doing what we were learning,” says Kumar, who lives in Jersey City with his wife and two children. “I must say, the most important thing I learned is to be confident, not tentative. To believe in myself and my skills and ability. I learned to handle a project from beginning to end. And I learned how to create a dedicated team by being a leader.”

The Project Management Program also offered Kumar something tangible and invaluable: It gave him a vocabulary that has proved critical in his work. “It gave me depth of knowledge,” he explains. “You see your seniors do a job and you hear their vocabulary, but I learned in concrete terms what they were saying and doing. I learned what certain terms meant and how to initiate projects. A shared language is everything. They know you know what you're talking about.”

Kumar began working for Credit Suisse 13 years ago, shortly after arriving from India. Though he held a master's degree in computer software already, Kumar says he longed to round out his education by studying at an American university. “American leadership is renowned,” he says. “I wanted leadership training from an American perspective.”

It wasn't simply the professors and their experience in American corporations; his fellow students proved “so interesting and varied in their professions,” he says. “I made, and still have, some lovely friends from the program. They taught me creativity; they were creative people. One is a cybersecurity engineer for the U.S. Coast Guard now. Other students were working in startups and in all sorts of interesting projects.”

Kumar is proud of his own achievements, including having realized his dream of completing a program at an American university, but he is honored to use his knowledge to lift up other engineers, particularly those from India.” I find it rewarding to teach people coming up how to approach a problem, resolve it, guide them in analysis and in follow-through. At Touro, I learned to guide, not micromanage. It teaches those less experienced or insecure to grow better and better and take on leadership roles with confidence knowing someone has their best interests at heart.”

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