Our roots
Hack4Impact UIUC Alumni Spotlight
We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the people who came before us.
As we’ve started nearing the end of our 10th semester, we felt inspired to take some time to reconnect with our roots. Recently, Hack4Impact member Eesha Barua and I had the privilege of chatting with Hack4Impact UIUC co-founders Alvin Wu and Varun Munjeti. Not only was hearing their story of forming our chapter and their journey since then incredibly inspiring, but also a great reminder that we wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the people who came before us. Our members tend to have a lasting impact on the org, one which they usually don’t get to see themselves, but goes on to lift posterity. With Alvin and Varun in particular, building Hack4Impact UIUC from the ground up and setting the org up for success has impacted hundreds of our members, a number of nonprofits, and those around us.
We hope that you get to see a glimpse of this through their stories…
Q: What inspired you to found the UIUC chapter of Hack4Impact?
Alvin: In Summer 2017, I was interning at Fitbit in SF and Varun was also there interning at SalesforceIQ. We were approaching going into our final year at school, and I was looking to do something entrepreneurial and build some kind of community before leaving. I had a lot of interests that I hadn’t explored yet, with the intersection of tech and social impact being one of them. UIUC lacked a tech x social impact type of community where people could come together and work on initiatives.
Varun: With both of us being in our fifth year, it put us in a position where we were looking to do these kinds of things. The path to ending up in the world of frontend is easier to do now with the resources that are available, but resources weren’t consistent when I was learning. Things were chaotic and it was hard to learn on my own with certain roadblocks in the process. If I had someone who I could’ve gone to, it would have saved me a lot of time and accelerated the process. Later in college, I felt more comfortable with where I was at and wanted to find a way to be a resource and help accelerate other people’s learnings, especially with frontend not being covered in curriculum but being super common everywhere. Hack4Impact was a great way to do what I was planning on doing — instead of making random meme websites, I was doing something useful. The long term of working on projects/products that expose you to the development cycle is helpful to learn.
Q: Can you reflect on your experiences starting our chapter and what that journey was like?
Alvin: We were wrapping up our final summer internships and I pitched Varun the idea, asking him if he wanted to build Hack4Impact UIUC together. Back in 2017, Hack4Impact was just starting to look at expanding into other schools. It originated at UPenn and had been around for a few years. At that point, alumni from the UPenn chapter were looking to do more. They had an event at an Airbnb office where one of the board members worked. I saw their presentation and thought it was a good opportunity to leverage good resources to supercharge starting our own org on campus. We applied to be a part of their incubator program. I was planning on starting a nonprofit, whether it was a part of Hack4Impact or our own. Things worked out and being under the Hack4Impact umbrella gave us a lot of resources like sourcing our first client without doing any work. Being able to chat with the original founders of Hack4Impact definitely helped a lot. In our first semester, we recruited a small team of six developers, grew to over thirty members the next semester, and things continued growing from there.
Varun: The first semester was really short by the time we recruited people and got things spun up. We only had half of the semester to work, which wasn’t much time to ship something. We went and pitched what we were doing to UIUC without much to back it up. Looking back, I want to thank everyone who gave us a shot. In our second semester, things got interesting. I walked into our first All Hands and was like “Who are these people? This org doesn’t look the same.” We had eight people right before, but now, the ECEB room was filled up. It was kind of wild. There were big stepping stones as a part of the process of growing the org.
I had to switch from leading a team to leading a team of leaders who are leading their team.
I transitioned into building trust and reliance, which are good tests of all of the things that might fall under the bucket of leadership when you’re not able to reach everyone in the org.
Q: What are some unexpected things that came up that you worked through?
Varun: I don’t remember every situation, but I did have to suddenly take the place of a role that resembles people management to an extent of being a director. People management is kind of hard. You’re seeing life problems and people with different personalities. We were also students who were facing similar problems and didn’t have the answers ourselves. Are we qualified to help other people solve the same problems? There were some unsolved mysteries there.
Q: How would you say Hack4Impact has impacted your college experience, post-college life, and/or career?
Alvin: Starting Hack4Impact UIUC and building those friendships was important and I’m happy that I was able to get that community. Post-college, I’ve been grateful for the community and foundations that I built. Whenever I visit SF, I have so many close Hack4Impact friends to meetup with and even younger members.
In terms of career, Hack4Impact and the situations that it puts you in give you a novel perspective on things in industry that most people won’t have going in, especially if you have the experience of a Product Manager, Tech Lead, or Co-Director in Hack4Impact.
When you’re leading an org, engineering team, or product managers, you have to discuss a lot of things like organizational strategy, diversity, management, engineering decisions, and people management. These are conversations that people don’t get exposure to until they’re well into their careers, as these are things that directors, VPs, and CEOs discuss. Hack4Impact is not a hyper-growth startup, but building those skills that people don’t have exposure to until later in their careers is super helpful.
Varun: My three priorities were Hack4Impact, passing classes, and dance, in that order. Hack4Impact played a pretty significant role in how my last year went.
It was the time out of my entire college experience where I felt like I had the most sense of purpose, and I couldn’t seem to do enough of Hack4Impact fast enough.
While this was super stressful, Hack4Impact was the biggest source of motivational energy I’ve ever experienced, and it really set the tone for how I carry on in work and in life. I still see Hack4Impact friends in SF. If someone from Hack4Impact UIUC came to SF right now, I feel like I could hangout with them. It’s important to have peers and network in college because further into your career, it becomes harder and more valuable to have that network.
As a New Grad SWE, you get this slice of a project and figure out how to operate. That’s the easy part. I put it on autopilot and thought about things that directors and VPs think about. Samsara was going through the hyper-growth phase, so there was room for gaps to be filled. I was grateful that I was able to step up and fill some of those gaps as a New Grad, and they were the same types of things that we were thinking about in Hack4Impact. Hack4Impact has really influenced the way I go about work.
Q: What have you been up to since graduation?
Varun: I started working at Samsara during the hyper-growth stage, which was super exciting. I hopped around teams a lot. I was in SF for a year, moved to the London office for six months, and then COVID happened. Last February, I left and went to Taiwan with Alvin. At that point, I didn’t really have a plan and was just going to see what happened and go with it. I was in Taiwan until they had an outbreak. Everyone left and I came home and got vaccinated. I realized that America was open in June of last year and decided to stay and hopped around for almost a year, visiting friends that I hadn’t seen in a few years. After that, I travelled in Europe and eventually stumbled my way into my current job. I had been talking to a company for a while and the timing was right, so I formally joined in December and moved to SF in February. I still travelled for a bit and am in transitionary phase right now. I led a very nomadic lifestyle and now, I’m trying to shift gears and remain in one place.
Alvin: I moved to SF after graduation and lived with Varun for a few years. I worked on the R&D team at Fitbit and transitioned into product through their APM program. Then, I joined Samsara, and a bunch of Hack4Impact alumni were there. I made the choice to go back to SWE as a sacrifice and then became a lead on a team where I drove EVs and data products. After that, I had a cool opportunity to be one of the first members on a data team. I took exodus to Taiwan, came back, and was deciding on whether to take the next year off or work on my own things. I talked to another company at that time and the CEO convinced me to join. Currently, I’m based in Chicago working on data. I hop around for a week each month, usually to see a friend in SF or NYC.
Q: What are some things that you like to do in your down time?
Alvin: Food, I love eating at good restaurants. It’s currently Chicago restaurant week and I have a reservation booked every other day for the next week. I play a lot of tennis too. And ever since Varun and I visited Taiwan, we became big tea tasters, so we’re trying new tea every other day. A big recent time consumer has been web3 and the NFT rabbit hole. A lot of my time on weekend mornings is spent doing research.
Varun: Consumption — food, tea, cocktails, coffee. I bought seven bags of coffee beans in Columbia. I want to transition more of that consumption into creation since I’m in a place and options are more stable. I’m used to the time limit aspect, but I can slow down a bit now, and put consumption back into creation. I’m trying to get better at cooking and making my own drinks.
Q: What inspires you these days?
Varun: I was in a position to taste big ideas and try to do all sorts of things. Something that I learned in the process of over-leveraging is that there are a lot of personal development things that I’ve sacrificed or not taken into account. It’s very admirable to see people making big achievements and moving the needle in running a company or whatever they may be doing. Maybe I feel like I’m surrounded by so many of those people and became numb to it in a way. There’s no shortage of those people.
Lately, I’ve been in a position when I admire people who are good at managing themselves as a person.
People who are good at managing and controlling chaos in their life, looking after themselves, and being cognizant of how they treat others and what they do for others tend to be under-appreciated. These are also typically sacrificed in pursuit of larger goals. With where I’m at, I’m trying to appreciate more.
Alvin: The web3 and NFT space is super exciting right now. There’s a lot of inspiration from builders and influencers in that space. I found myself immersed in that space for hours.
Traveling, spending time with friends, and taking time off from work completely, like two weeks to a month, to reflect on what inspires me and what I want to do next is something that’s helpful in finding inspiration.
I find inspiration when I detach myself from work. Taking a step back from the grind gives you a lot of visibility and insight into thinking more clearly. When Varun and I were in Taiwan, we weren’t working and it was a good time to get inspiration.
Q: If there’s anything that you could tell your college self, what would you say to them?
Varun: I know the guy I’d be telling this to and I know he wouldn’t listen. I’d tell him to slow down every once in a while and take a moment. I always went ham in college, even during break time. However, I needed to go through all of the hurdles that I faced to get to this point where I think this way. Aside from that, I would probably give some reassurance during difficult times; a lot of stressful worries were sometimes around if I was going to get an internship or job or if I’d be a useful member in society. Everyone can use a bit of reassurance that everything is going to be okay. It’s one thing to tell yourself or friends that versus really convince yourself.
I don’t think there exists a right set of things to tell yourself, as what you’ve come to believe is from the experiences you’ve gone through and learnings from those things.
You just have to go through the experiences to truly understand.
Alvin: I’d tell myself to build friendships and spend quality time with people in college. This tends to be a concept that people realized towards the end of college.
Never again will you be surrounded by so many people who are the same age and at the same stage of life.
Making friends in college is so important. After college, you might get lucky with a company like Samsara, but it’s hard to build friendships that will be lifelong. I’d tell my college self to invest and focus on that and not take it for granted.
