Soumya Hukkeri tells fellow grads at Northeastern’s Arlington commencement to “never stop believing in yourself.”
Soumya Hukkeri developed an automated solution that reduced her team’s manual work by 50% while doing an internship at Amazon Web Services.
A recent graduate from Northeastern University’s Arlington campus, Hukkeri handled the entire lifecycle of her project — from development and testing to deployment.
“For them to have that much trust in an intern gave me confidence,” says Hukkeri, who earned her master’s degree in information systems.
Her co-workers were supportive, Hukkeri says, and the team is still using her project every day.
Ten days after the internship ended, she received an official job offer from AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing platform.
“I had my full-time offer back in September of 2024, when I still had two semesters to finish,” she says.
Hukkeri, the student speaker at Northeastern’s Arlington commencement on Wednesday, says experiential learning was one of the main reasons she chose the university.
After earning an undergraduate degree in computer science in India, Hukkeri was eager to continue her education. She declined a job offer from Mercedes-Benz and traveled more than 8,200 miles to attend Northeastern.
“I knew a lot of people who have done their master’s here, and they had extremely good feedback about the professors and their connection with students,” says Hukkeri, whose older sister graduated from Northeastern’s Boston campus in 2023 with a master’s degree in computer science.
Hukkeri learned to navigate a new culture in the new country and landed the AWS internship in Seattle.
Hukkeri worked with the core EC2 load balancing team at AWS. Amazon EC2 — Elastic Compute Cloud — provides virtual, scalable computing capacity in the cloud, helping clients save on hardware costs. Load balancing involves distributing network traffic or workloads across multiple servers to improve performance and user experience.
“The internship at AWS was my first big job, so it was very interesting plus challenging,” she says.
On Wednesday, Hukkeri shared words of wisdom to her fellow graduates.
“You should never stop believing in yourself if you’ve dreamt of something,” she says. “You should believe that you can achieve it.”
Hukkeri believes not stressing too much about the outcome and “doing your bit” every day can take you far.
Hukkeri’s father, a software engineer, nurtured her and her sister’s interest in technology. She remembers watching her father and older sister code together.
“Normal dinner conversations were about the upcoming technology, about computers,” she says.
Hukkeri was fascinated by the idea of solving real-world problems from behind a laptop.
“Given a problem, I can type a few lines of code and it solves something,” she says. “I can create something new.”
Hukkeri says the Arlington campus appealed to her because of its proximity to the nation’s capital — a hub of technical innovation, security, defense and policy. She chose the information systems program for its balance of advanced software engineering and IT leadership training, she says.
“I aim to keep working in the technical field, but maybe later on, after a few years, get to the level of some leadership roles like a manager or a product lead,” she says. “I think information systems are the perfect blend to train me for that kind of a role.”
Beyond her coursework and internship, Hukkeri demonstrated leadership as a teaching assistant for four semesters. She received the Outstanding Student Teaching, Service, and Leadership Award from the College of Engineering and the Information Systems Award from the Multidisciplinary Graduate Engineering Programs department.
Looking ahead, she hopes to grow into a management role while continuing to develop meaningful software.
“Long term, I just want to keep creating software, applications and systems that are helpful to the people around me and that are easing or solving some kind of an issue or problem in their lives,” she says.