Sakthi Vetrivel ('15)

Christian Fulghum ‘77: Hi Sakthi, tell me about what you've been doing since you left The Overlake School.

Sakthi Vetrivel ‘15: After I graduated from Overlake, I started at Cal Tech. I majored in Computer Science with a specialization in Machine Learning. And while I was there, I was our student body president for two years. I was captain of the volleyball team for three years and I was also the vice president of my dorm and a student RA. Cal Tech has a notoriously bad volleyball team. We hadn't won a game in program history and while I was there we actually got the chance to turn that around. My experience playing volleyball at Overlake really helped with that. I think my junior year of college we won our first game ever and this past season that they just had, they won four games in conference, which is a huge step up. It's been pretty exciting.

Christian: Oh, that's wonderful. Do you think that's just the happenstance of coaching and players or do you think that there's a recognition maybe that, as with Overlake, just because you are someone who is inclined towards being a serious academic STEM student doesn't mean that there isn't value in athletic competition and playing as part of a team.

Sakthi: While I was at Overlake I realized that volleyball was really important to me. It taught me to be a really great team player. It was also a chance to step on the court and just kind of zone out of all of the academic and other pressures that you have in your life. You can just focus on volleyball and focus on your teammates and the game. And I guess out of learning to be a good team player at Overlake helped me to support the program at Cal Tech. I was assisting the coaches with recruiting new members for the team, by helping them when recruits came to visit, or taking them to classes. And actually, for all of the work that I did for the volleyball team, I won our conference's character award, which is the Sky character award, which means that I exemplified the values and attributes that they would expect from an NCAA athlete. That's awarded to one person a year and yeah, that was pretty cool. It's pretty cool to get recognized for the work that you do.

Christian: Did you find that playing for Cal Tech had a similar sort of value by being focused on that and having a little bit of a break from the academic intensity?

Sakthi: Yeah, absolutely, and it's also, it gives you a really great community that you can lean on when the academic pressures start to get to you, you have those people to vent to, to talk to, to lean on.

Christian: Yeah. Did you feel that you were well prepared for Cal Tech?

Sakthi: I think Overlake taught me a lot about time management because I had the opportunity to take on a lot of different things while I was there. So something I realized when I got to college was, “Oh like I'm able to organize my time much more effectively than other people here and I'm able to push myself a lot harder because Overlake taught me that I can,” and that gave me that competitive and collaborative spirit. As a result, I was able to work with other people much more effectively. I was able to communicate really well with my teachers and other students and I was able to take on a lot more than the typical Cal Tech student because I already had a lot of that time management and communication figured out from my time in high school.

Christian: Then it wasn't some big step up for you in terms of your ability to manage the challenge?

Sakthi: The most challenging part was just recognizing that, I mean the material was much more difficult, but you're just going through with a lot more people. So at the end of the day it's about not just how smart you are, but how well you can collaborate with other people. The fact that I was able to learn those collaboration skills at Overlake really, really helped me in college, even though it was academically very challenging.

Christian: Right. One of the things that I've heard in my interviews with alums from all the different decades - there's now five decades - is that Overlake is really competitive and expects a lot, but it's also supportive and safe. What other alums have told me is that what's sometimes challenging is when they arrive at college, the intense competition is still there, but some of that support network falls away. As a natural result, you have to build out your new support network. Did you find that to be the case?

Sakthi: Absolutely. I think the fact that Cal Tech or Overlake is such a small collaborative space with such academic rigor is what inspired me to ultimately choose Cal Tech. Cal Tech has about 250 students per class, so it's an incredibly small school. And when I stepped on campus, I felt that sense of community that I felt at Overlake and that's really why I picked Cal Tech. I knew that it would be a space where I could challenge myself, where I would feel safe and I would still feel that sense of community.

Christian: And talk to me a little bit about Machine Learning. I've had a couple of conversations with alums. What does that really mean?

Sakthi: Machine Learning is like Artificial Intelligence, being able to present computers with some sort of data and then allowing them to make predictions based on that data, on what could happen in the future or things like that.

Christian: You just gave the clearest explanation anybody has; I have heard some long and involved ones. That's sort of what I assumed, but does that mean that you're doing intensive coding in your studies, or is it more a higher-level thinking about it, schematically or philosophically?

Sakthi: Yeah, so I went to a research institution, so pretty much everyone who comes out tries to get a PhD afterwards. So when I say studied Machine Learning, I really mean I studied the math behind Machine Learning and how you would design a Machine Learning algorithm and so forth.

Christian: Got it. So you've now graduated, are you on your way to your PhD?

Sakthi: While I was at Cal Tech, I took on a few leadership positions and I realized that what I really enjoyed was managing engineering projects. It gives me a chance to use all my technical knowledge, also allowing me to exert a little more influence over what I'm building and communicate with a lot of different groups of people. I’m now working at Microsoft as a Program Manager for the Azure Kubernetes service team.

Christian: And Azure I've heard of. What's that second term?

Sakthi: KUBERNETES. It's K-U-B-E-R-N-E-T-E-S, it's this new way of orchestrating containers. It’s a method of automating the way that applications are run. Let’s say you have a website, this would basically break it down into all of its components and then make sure you're able to support whatever traffic load that is coming to hit that website. It stays up all the time and we have a really great team and it's actually one of the fastest growing Azure teams in history. I'm really excited to be a part of it. 

Christian: Wow, that's awesome. I have a brother who's a consulting engineer and the parallel here in what you're saying is that if you're somebody who really understands the nuts and bolts of the technology, who's also facile in communicating and coordinating the actions of people, and also connecting teams that have very different styles of communicating and maybe different scopes, that's an extremely valuable skillset. It's like being a specialized translator, not just a manager because you're potentially dealing with people in sales and marketing or at the C Suite level and you're also dealing with people who are doing the actual construction or the engineering and somehow you need to communicate back and forth. Helping them harmonize their needs, their deadlines, their budgets, their goals. Do I have that right?

Sakthi: Yeah, that's exactly what I do on a day to day basis. And I think the communication skills that I gained at Overlake were really the fundamentals for everything that I've done since.

Christian: It sounds like you're having a really positive experience with Microsoft right now. Do you feel like for the time being, staying in that lane makes sense and going to grad school is a ways off at this point?

Sakthi: Yes. I'm not planning on going to grad school at this point. While I was in college, I applied to a few MBA programs and I was accepted. I'm expecting to go to Stanford in about two years. I was granted deferred admission, which means that I can wait up to two to five years before. I'm planning on doing that, but we'll see how much I like Microsoft. I might like it too much!

Christian: If you're learning new things and it's rewarding for you personally and career-wise and you feel respected and valued, that's a pretty good life right there.

Sakthi: Yeah, might not need another degree.

Christian: Or maybe not that degree or not now. Those are all possibilities. What sort of advice might you give your younger self looking back now? 

Sakthi: While I was in high school I really tried to plan out every detail of my future and it would actually cause me a lot of anxiety that I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do when I grew up. And still don't know what I want to do. I'm pretty young. I don't really know what I'm doing now. I guess the idea there is just be patient with yourself and continue doing things that you really like because you don't know where they'll lead you. I remember while I was playing volleyball, I wasn't really sure where that was going to go because I wasn't planning on being recruited by a college at all. But it was one of the most valuable experiences that I had in college. Being able to play. So just take on opportunities that interest you, and don't worry about where they might lead you.

Christian: I get it. I graduated from Overlake in '77 and I'm going to be 60 in February and I'll be doggoned if I know what I'm going to do when I grow up. But I've had a great life and done a lot of different things and Overlake played a huge role in that. It benefited me in ways that have gone on for decades. I will say that one of the great things about getting to this point in life is that I’m finally starting to sort of settle into the notion that not knowing is really okay. It’s actually very rational and normal. Knowing is the illusion. Most of life is not knowing and you can create the illusion of knowing or deciding. But I think your point is that if you make decisions just to make decisions, then what you're doing is closing out possibilities you don't know enough about. And sometimes you have to let the door hang open there and see what happens. Easier said than done perhaps.

Anything else you'd like to add before we close off here in terms of what we've discussed?

Sakthi: No, I think that's it.

Christian: All right. Thank you so much for taking the time to do this and for being a really inspirational young alum, and I wish you the best of luck with your career, your life, and, and thanks for making Overlake proud.

Sakthi: Thank you so much.