Abi’s Got Plans
At 22, Abirami Chockalingam, (Abi, for short) has the next few years of her life planned. She’s going to graduate in December, start working for a Silicon Valley tech company early next year and land a senior-level role by 2026.
Her plans aren’t all work-related. She wants to bring her parents over from India and show them her two favorite places in the world, San Francisco and the Maroon Bells of Colorado. She wants to volunteer at a dog shelter. And she wants to bring her grandmother, who’s 75, to come and live with her.
This isn’t just in her head, by the way: it’s on Microsoft Project.
Discovering her passion
Abi’s all about bringing ideas to fruition. She fell in love with the processes, tools, and techniques involved in making things happen when she took a software project management course at university, as part of a degree in computer science and engineering. When she got picked to lead a large team project in her final year, it became clear that she liked planning, delegating, and helping team members succeed more than she liked coding. “I knew I could see myself doing that in the future,” she said. “It came naturally to me.”
As soon as she got her bachelor’s, she began looking for Master’s programs abroad to advance her project management skills. She eventually enrolled in Northeastern’s Master of Science in Project Management program for the opportunity to network with industry leaders and get real-life project management experience through co-ops.
A year and a half later, just as she planned, Abi has mastered cost estimation, risk assessment, and scheduling, and learned to create risk plans, change management plans, and project plans. What she didn’t expect was to gain essential life skills — like leadership, time management, and critical thinking — or develop the confidence she never had before entering the program.
Getting past old challenges
Growing up, Abi was bullied about her weight and the color of her skin. “I was overweight for nineteen years,” she said. “Wherever I went, people said things that haunted me. My relatives and friends used to tease me in public, and I felt really bad. Those comments had a very negative impact on my life; I used to have an inferiority complex and very low self-esteem,” she said.
By the time she arrived at Northeastern’s Silicon Valley campus, she was ready to leave it all behind. She began tackling the kinds of things she’d previously thought weren’t for her, like giving talks, organizing events, mentoring her peers, and becoming active on social media. Every time she succeeded, she believed in herself a little bit more. “Northeastern has really pushed me to grow. My advisors were especially helpful in encouraging me to put myself out there and do the best that I can. They trust me and set high standards for me,” she said.
Abi speaks at an event for student leaders
And graduate school isn’t the only reason for Abi’s newfound self-confidence. Her brother Skandan is just as much, if not more, responsible for her transformation.
The power of pep talks
When they were young, he and Abi didn’t always get along. But when Abi was struggling as a teenager, Skandan, who is seven years older, stepped in to support her. “He was like, ‘People are going to talk no matter what you look like. It’s you who has to stand up for yourself. If you’re happy with yourself, it doesn’t matter what other people think.’”
Abi said these pep talks helped her feel better about herself. “They changed my perspective. We became really close.”
Abi and her brother, Skandan
They remained close even after Skandan moved to the US, a few years later, to study and build a career in tech. (Today, he’s a senior software engineer at Apple.) The two used to talk on the phone for hours, to the point where their mom began to feel left out. “She’d get FOMO,” Abi said. When Abi got accepted into Northeastern and found out there was a campus in Silicon Valley, there was no question as to where she was going.
Moving in with her brother and his wife means that she now gets pep talks daily and in person. “The things he says do wonders to me,” Abi said. “Living with him is amazing because I get words of encouragement all the time.”
Abi and her parents
Abi still has moments of self-doubt, of course. When she does, her brother reminds her to look to their family for inspiration — their sacrifices, their struggles, their resilience — and she renews her motivation to work hard toward her goals.
Right now, her days are incredibly busy as she juggles internship interviews, homework assignments, mentoring sessions, and studying. Even her weekends are filled with learning and self-improvement activities, like reading, reflecting, and taking classes on LinkedIn.
She’s doing everything she can to make her vision come true. And if things don’t completely work out as planned? That’s okay, because she’s also planning for what can go wrong. It’s all there on Microsoft Project.