YCore Alumni, Simran Kohli, writes published article about her experience as a YCore Fellow

We are always thrilled when YCore fellows enjoyed the program enough to recommend it to others. Simran Kohli, YCore alum and Sales Engineer at Juniper Networks, told her company about her experience at YCore and they recently published a short article about it. This article belongs to Juniper Networks’ private Intranet so we cannot share the link but we were invited to copy and paste the article below for your reading enjoyment. Thank you to Simran and Juniper Networks for helping boost our visibility so we can reach a larger scale of young professionals in the Bay Area!

We are so happy Simran had a valuable experience at YCore - if you are a fellow or alum and feel driven to spread the word about YCore in your networks, please email us at info@ycore.org to chat. We are always looking for new ways to tell young professionals about our program.

Author: Simran Kohli

Published by: Juniper Networks

Act Local, Affect Global with YCore

Simran Kohli, a Sales Engineer with the Global Proof of Concept lab team believes that as a relatively young person, finding her footing in Silicon Valley has opened doors for her. Which has meant leveraging the opportunities afforded to her, by paying it forward, enabling, and elevating people who are on their journey to land on solid ground.

‘Act local, affect global’ is not a new notion and YCore serves to make that ideology a reality. 

YCore enables individuals who are looking to navigate the non-profit and volunteer spaces, wanting to do more but not knowing where to start. They do so by facilitating partnerships between individuals and non-profits; by connecting people to causes they care about centered on making community-based change. 

As a fellow during the Winter’21 cohort, Simran was part of a 5 member team partnered with Immigrants Rising, a San Francisco-based organization working specifically on their California In-State Tuition tool.

The tool enables undocumented immigrants to find a path to college within the state of California by helping them determine their eligibility for in-state tuition by effectively translating the legalese into a step-by-step framework. The team spent 4 months building UI/UX testing procedures, running through a cycle of user testing based on the defined procedures and analyzing their results. They also analyzed previously collected data from the tool to find patterns and identify the best ways to visualize them using a cost-effective tool for the partner organization, culminating in a usable dashboard. Through that experience, the team members gained project and product management knowledge.

A parallel aspect of the program was the workshops run by the team at YCore, to educate and guide the fellows on adopting systems lens thinking, how to conduct empathy interviews and how to fundraise to meet their individual goals of $1500 as part of the commitment to being a fellow.

 Simran believes that by investing your time and money with YCore, you can affect meaningful change in your local community, moving the needle in the right direction, and targeting causes aimed at supporting socio-economic equality, access to education, and environmental justice to name a few.

For her YCore met the dual purpose of giving back with intentionality and finding a sense of community in meeting the like-minded individuals it brings together.