Sunjay Kumar

Background

About Sunjay Kumar

I am the sort of person who is always building something. In my time at Northwestern, that meant building student organizations. Whatever my role, that meant working with my fellow students to organize events of every type, from slam poetry workshops to kite flying days. When I was finishing up my degree and preparing to transition to full time employment, I looked back over my experiences those four years and distilled two basic principles for taking my next step. Those two principles have become something of my guiding philosophy whenever I make big decisions: I want to have a positive impact on the world, and I want to grow. My first year out, tutoring math for high school students on Chicago's southwest side, I did both. I saw a huge progress in my students' math skills, and I saw my own skills as a teacher and as a team member grow. I practiced taking and giving feedback and building relationships across cultural and political differences. I also used my spare time to grow myself in other ways, canvassing for political campaigns and working on the board of Stone Soup Co-op, where I live. At the end of that year, though, I knew that continuing to grow and have the biggest impact I could meant switching careers. So I decided to retool, and I headed to Dev Bootcamp to learn how to be a web developer. Those two principles guided me to my apprenticeship at Triggr Health, where I put the skills I developed at Dev Bootcamp and at Narrative Science to work directly helping people. I built tools and added features that made clinicians and administrators more effective at reaching people. I'm now building on those experiences and looking for projects with a social mission, so if you need a developer, don't hesitate to reach out to me at sunjaydk@gmail.com!