How UMBC Helped Turn Experience into Expertise
After four years as a Salesforce Developer, Shashank Puppala, M.S. ’26, information systems, came to UMBC looking to expand his technical expertise and prepare for the future of technology. Through the Information Systems graduate program, he gained hands-on experience in AI, cloud computing, data analytics, and enterprise systems while maintaining a perfect 4.0 GPA. His journey demonstrates how UMBC helps working professionals build new skills, deepen their knowledge, and advance their careers in a rapidly evolving technology landscape.
Information Systems: Tell us about yourself and your journey at UMBC.
Shashank Puppala: My name is Shashank Puppala, and I recently graduated with a perfect 4.0 CGPA, which is something I am really proud of, especially while balancing academics and campus life.
Before coming to UMBC, I spent four years as a Salesforce Developer at a tech firm in Hyderabad, India, where I worked on building integrations and custom solutions for clients in the pharmaceutical and healthcare space, which includes multinational pharma companies. That experience gave me a solid foundation in how enterprise systems actually work in the real world, and honestly, it made me hungry to learn more.
At UMBC, I worked as a Desk Assistant with Residential Life, which I really enjoyed — it kept me connected to the campus community and reminded me that at the end of the day, the tech which we build is all about making people’s lives easier.
On the academic side, UMBC helped me expand beyond what I already knew, pushing me into cloud platforms, data systems, and broader information systems and management concepts. Keeping a 4.0 every single semester was not just about grades; it came from genuinely loving what I was studying.
It’s been a great two years, and I’m walking away with a clearer picture of where I want to go and the skills to get there.
IS: How has UMBC and the IS Department helped prepare you for your future career?
SP: UMBC’s IS program really filled in the gaps and leveled up what I already knew. Coming in with industry experience in Salesforce development and Cloud services management, I wasn’t starting from the very beginning but the coursework pushed me into areas I had not fully explored yet. Courses like Cloud Computing, Advanced Database Projects, Data Mining, Database Design, Data Analytics for Cybersecurity, and Software Engineering with Generative AI gave me both the theoretical grounding and hands-on practice that directly complement my professional background.
What I appreciate most was how well everything got connected. Concepts I studied in class such as cloud infrastructure, data pipelines, database architecture got mapped directly onto real problems I faced at work, and suddenly things clicked at a deeper level. It made me a more well-rounded technologist, not just a Salesforce developer.
Outside the classroom, I was also an active member of the Career Center Student Advisory Council (CCSAC) which was a great experience. It gave me a seat at the table in conversations about student career development and honestly sharpened my professional thinking in ways that go beyond technical skills.
The IS department creates an environment where you’re constantly being challenged to think bigger, and for someone with my background, that’s exactly what I needed to take the next step.
IS: What experiences, projects, or opportunities have been most meaningful during your time at UMBC?
SP: My time at UMBC has been a mix of academics, research, and campus involvement. Two of the major projects that are meaningful were building a Semantic Drift Auditor – a tool that detects when AI-assisted requirement refinements silently change the meaning of software requirements given by client. It was a real research challenge that combined NLP, transformer models, and software engineering, and seeing it come together was genuinely exciting. The second was about cyberbullying detection and classification system built on tweets posted by people, where we compared multiple machine learning models like SVM, Random Forest, and Naive Bayes to identify harmful content across categories like age, ethnicity, gender, and religion. What made both projects meaningful was not just the technical work, but the real-world impact behind them; AI governance on one side and online safety on the other.
Beyond these academic projects, working as a desk assistant with Residential Life kept me grounded and reminded me why the human side of technology matters. And being part of the Career Center Student Advisory Council gave me a broader perspective on how students navigate their professional journeys.
IS: Have you participated in experiences outside the classroom connected to your field?
SP: I attended an Agentforce seminar hosted by Salesforce, it was a great experience and bridged the gaps between my graduate studies and professional background in software development. It gave me a firsthand look at where agentic AI is heading within enterprise platforms and reinforced an idea how the concepts I was exploring academically, LLMs and intelligent automation, are already being deployed in real world business environments.
IS: What tools, technologies, or skills have you used throughout your academic or professional experiences?
SP: At UMBC, my coursework and projects pushed me deeper into AI and machine learning in ways that genuinely changed how I think about building systems. In the Cyberbullying Detection project, I worked with natural language processing techniques — TF-IDF vectorization, Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machines, Random Forest, and Multi-Layer Perceptron models to classify harmful content across social media at scale. The Semantic Drift Auditor research took things further into modern AI territory, where I used SBERT sentence transformer embeddings, cosine similarity scoring, and the Llama-3.3-70B large language model via the Groq API to detect meaning-level drift in AI-refined software requirements. I also built an interactive Streamlit dashboard to visualize results and used pandas and matplotlib throughout. I have got hands on PLSQL and worked heavily on database management.
On the professional side, my experience gave me a deep expertise in Apex, Lightning Web Components, Aura Components, and REST/SOAP API integrations. One area I’m particularly excited about is Agentforce — Salesforce’s agentic AI platform : which represents the intersection of everything I have learned academically about AI and what I have built professionally on Salesforce. Working with intelligent, autonomous agents that can take action within CRM workflows is exactly where I see the future of enterprise software heading, and it’s a space I’m actively building expertise in.
From a broader tech stack perspective, I am comfortable with Python, JavaScript, Java, SQL, and work regularly with cloud platforms including AWS and GCP. For development workflows, I have used GitHub, JIRA, Postman, and CI/CD pipelines throughout both my academic and professional work.
What ties all these skills together is a genuine curiosity about where AI meets real business problems and how I can solve those problems using these skills which I have learned and enhanced.
IS: What advice would you give to current or future students?
SP: If I have to say one thing to future students it would be to come to school with an open mind, especially if you’re coming in with prior work experience like I did. I thought I knew a lot with my corporate experience, but UMBC genuinely surprised me. The program pushed me into areas I had not explored, challenged me to think beyond what I already knew, and gave me the academic depth to back up the practical skills I built.
And try to get involved more in on-campus activities and extracurricular works. Whether it’s joining a student council, working an on-campus job, or diving deep into a research project; these experiences shape you just as much as the coursework. Some of my most valuable learning experiences happened outside the lecture hall.
Coming to the IS department, the faculty are quite engaging, the coursework is current and relevant, and the environment genuinely prepares you for where the industry is heading, not just where it has been. With AI and cloud transforming every field right now, being at a place that takes that seriously matters a lot.
Maintain your GPA, take your projects seriously, and don’t be afraid to go deep on something that genuinely interests you. That curiosity is what sets you apart when you graduate because UMBC is all about inquiring minds.
IS: Which skill or area are you most excited to continue developing after graduation?
SP: Frankly, I want to develop my skills related to agentic AI. After working with large language models and agentic AI through my graduate projects, and seeing how other cloud technologies push AI into real business workflows, I want to go deeper into building intelligent systems that don’t just store and display data, but actually reason, act, and make decisions on behalf of users.
On the cloud and data side, I want to sharpen my skills around scalable cloud architectures and how data pipelines feed into AI-driven applications. My coursework in Cloud Computing and Data Analytics gave me a solid foundation, but I want to explore a bit more on how this can be applied at a larger scale in production environments.
The thread connecting all of it is agentic AI, systems that combine cloud infrastructure, clean data pipelines, and intelligent automation to solve problems that traditional software simply cannot. So, that’s the space that I am most excited to grow in.
IS: What are your career goals or roles you are you interested in pursuing?
SP: My immediate goal is to continue growing as a Salesforce Developer, as I have experience in this role. But honestly, my time at UMBC has broadened my ambitions quite a bit and I am genuinely interested in roles that sit at the intersection of Salesforce, cloud, and data, i.e. whether that’s a Salesforce Developer working on AI-driven features like Agentforce, or a Cloud Engineer designing the infrastructure that enterprise applications run on using AWS or Azure, or a data-focused role where I’m building pipelines and analytics systems that power better decisions. I am interested in all these roles.
To learn more about Shashank and his work, connect with him on LinkedIn.
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