Taking ULM With Me: A Thank-You Letter on the Way Out

April 28, 2026. The day before this photo, I sat at my desk in Monroe and wondered if I had done enough.

Then ULM gave me the 2025–2026 Dean's Award of Excellence and named me Outstanding Graduate of the College of Business and Social Sciences.

Four years ago I landed in Louisiana from Nepal with a duffel bag, an I-20, and a list of professors I hoped would say yes. They did. Every one of them.

The smaller plaque in the back is from the Google Developer Group on Campus chapter I led this year: 12 board members, 250+ students, ULM Hawkathon, TechXpo, every Saturday workshop where someone tried Cloud Run or LangChain for the first time. That one means just as much as the gold one.

What four years actually held

Some of what filled four years:

• ICPC NA South Division 1 State Champion with the ULM team
• A summer at the Simons Foundation in New York, building a 1.2 TB distributed GPU pipeline with a 22× speedup
• Co-founding alfred_, where we ship every week
• President of Google Developer Group on Campus ULM, leading 250+ students through the Hawkathon, TechXpo, and weekly AI workshops

And a quieter half that does not fit a bullet point:

• Three years as a Student Web Developer for the university
• Several semesters as a teaching assistant for incoming CS students
• The capstone on Drona, where I led four teammates building an AI code-grading platform
• The NoteMeet Tech Expo win and RhymeAI, a Nexus Louisiana Technology Cup finalist
• IEEE Shreveport Section webmaster, and the Tech Forum on AI we ran this spring
• GrowLocal at the ULM Entrepreneurship Competition, where I served as CTO of our pitched startup
• AWS Project — 1st place and BEE Integration — 2nd place
• Three AWS and Databricks certifications picked up between sprints

What the awards are really recognizing

I am a CS major (with a Math minor), but most of the work I am proudest of happened across the college.

My very first research was with Dr. Jhim Shim in Mathematics on Prime Counting. That project taught me I liked the slow, careful kind of problem before I knew I liked the fast, shippable kind. From there I collaborated with faculty in marketing, business, and aviation on problems they did not have to share with an undergraduate but did anyway.

That cross-college part is what I think the awards are really recognizing. And it is the part that taught me the most.

None of it was the plan. The plan was: graduate, work hard, make my parents proud. ULM gave me the room to find out the real plan was bigger.

Thank you

Thank you to:

• Dr. Jhim Shim, for the first research door anyone opened for me.
• The Computer Science department that has been my home for four years.
• The Computer Information Systems faculty at the William D. Hoover School of Accounting, Financial & Information Services.
• The College of Business and Social Sciences office.
• The marketing, management, and aviation faculty who let me sit in on their problems.
• Every professor who held office hours past 5.
• The GDG board, the ICPC team, the Simons crew in NYC, my alfred_ co-founders, and the friends who let me think out loud at 2 AM.

About the awards

The Dean's Award of Excellence is presented each year by the College of Business and Social Sciences at the University of Louisiana Monroe to recognize a graduating senior whose academic record and contributions to the college community stood out for the year.

The Outstanding Graduate designation names the College's top graduating senior across its four schools: the Hoover School of Accounting, Financial & Information Services; Behavioral and Social Sciences; Construction Management; and the Turrentine School of Management. Both are presented at the College's spring recognition ceremony.

Graduating May 2026. Taking ULM with me.

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