Kunal Chitre: CECS degrees have given his career a running start
It’s a long way from the Indian state of Maharashtra to Los Angeles, but for Kunal Chitre (MS ’05; MS ’09), it has proven the shortest distance to his career goals. Chitre’s father is an engineer, and he always knew that he would one day be an engineer as well. So ten years ago, he left his hometown of Nagpur to pursue a master’s degree in electrical engineering at CSUN. Of the several U.S. universities he had applied to, CSUN was the first to accept him. Not only was it affordable, he says, “but it was close to Hollywood”—a decided bonus for a self-avowed movie buff.
Chitre entered the university in 2003, and as a student, he began working for Physical Plant Management on campus, managing the department’s technology infrastructure for over 300 users, including day-to-day IT operations. He was also involved with special engineering projects.
“My job with Physical Plant Management was one of the best things that ever happened to me,” he says. “I got dragged into little projects that gave me experience on so many levels. I don’t know if it was destiny or simply luck, but I chose communications and optics as my minor within electrical engineering. I got involved in a fiber optics project on campus, and that eventually led to the college’s first fiber optics lab. It was an amazing experience, interacting with so many wonderful people across the board. I really enjoyed being on campus—and still do.”
Chitre earned his master’s degree in electrical engineering with honors in fall 2005 and continued working for Physical Plant Management. His job was not permanent, however, and he needed a full-time job with an employer willing to sponsor his work visa. As part of a special engineering team, he designed an interactive touch-screen kiosk for a 1 megawatt fuel cell project on campus. Staff from Digital Energy, Inc., a company that was working with CSUN, were impressed with his work on the project and offered him an internship that eventually led to his full-time employment with the company.
For many people, landing a good job with a respected firm would have been enough. But in 2007, the same year he started at Digital Energy, Chitre returned to CECS to enroll in the engineering management master’s program. The reason, he explains, is that after finishing his master’s degree, he realized that he had strong technical skills but no formal education in managing projects or people.
“It dawned on me that if I wanted to grow, manage technical projects and continue to do amazing things on a bigger scale, I needed that people perspective and a formal management education,” he says. “I looked at quite a few programs, and engineering management was a very good fit, so I decided to pursue it.”
Chitre earned his second master’s degree, in engineering management, in 2009 and has continued to apply what he learned from his education at Digital Energy, where he has worked on numerous energy, sustainability and software projects. Lately, much of his work has been in software engineering as it pertains to facilities and energy management, and he designed and developed the company’s most successful smart meter data management products and services.
At the same time his career has been taking off, Chitre has remained active at the institution that made it all possible. “I’ve stayed involved with the campus even after I graduated because the company does quite a few projects with CSUN—that’s on the professional side,” he explains.
From an alumni standpoint, he regularly attends campus events, was the keynote speaker at the 2013 CECS commencement and attended the last CREST conference (see page 17), to name just a few examples. On his own time, he golfs, is a wine connoisseur and enjoys watching action movies. He also loves to stay abreast of new technologies and writes mobile apps for fun. In addition, he is working on his Spanish language skills.
“I’m at a point where at 32 years old, I reflect upon decisions I’ve made that have catapulted my life in a certain direction, but there is so much more that I want to do,” Chitre says. “I have the advantage of just starting to be in the prime of my life and career, and I intend to take full advantage of it.”