Hawk Advisor Maps UMass Lowell Electives Onto Job Titles

Jessica Vu built Hawk Advisor so UMass Lowell students could match electives to job titles the catalog never named. The free site went up during her senior year in computer science and drew roughly 200 users in two weeks. In June 2026, after she graduated, she held a software engineering offer from Nvidia and told classmates to start that mapping work early.

The Miner School of Computer and Information Sciences opened a separate bachelor’s degree the same season that writes those job titles into required classes. Hawk Advisor is the overlay she left on the older computer science options.

The Catalog Speaks in Options, Hiring Speaks in Titles

Vu, an international student from Vietnam with a mathematics minor, learned the gap the hard way. UMass Lowell’s computer science major still offers a general option plus bio-cheminformatics, cybersecurity, and data science. Those labels help with degree paperwork. They do not tell a student which electives a front-end engineer or a quality assurance engineer should take.

“If you know what career you want to do, you have to figure out which courses you should take so that you can maximize your chance when you apply for that specific career,” she said.

The cybersecurity option, launched in spring 2021, is the closest the catalog comes to a hiring vocabulary. It folds four required cybersecurity classes and two electives into a full computer science degree, with networking, cryptography, software security, and digital forensics on the list. The data science option adds linear algebra, data mining, machine learning, databases, and visualization, and it also satisfies a mathematics minor. Bio-cheminformatics reaches into genetics and chemistry. None of those tracks is named “front-end engineer.”

WHERE THE CATALOG STOPS AND JOB POSTS BEGIN

Vu said there is a lot of competition in the industry, so the earlier students prepare, the better. The Bureau of Labor Statistics still projects 15 percent growth through 2034 for software developers, quality assurance analysts, and testers, with a 2024 median pay of $131,450 and about 129,200 openings a year. That runway has not calmed young adults who sour on AI jobs. It has made the elective list feel like a hiring test.

What Hawk Advisor Shows Students

The site is free and open to computer science, computer engineering, and applied mathematics and statistics students. A user picks a career path and gets three kinds of information Vu wished she had in one place: average salary, projected job growth, and the electives the system treats as most relevant. It can also surface paths a student had not considered.

WHAT THE SITE PUTS NEXT TO A CAREER PATH

• Pay snapshot: Average salary for the role the student is testing.
• Hiring trend: Projected job growth attached to that path.
• Course list: Electives tagged as useful for that job, including classes outside the home department.
• Cross-major reach: The same overlay for computer science, computer engineering, and applied math and statistics.

An applied mathematics student aiming at biostatistics might be pointed to public health classes that never show up on a standard math map. That is the whole product: a translator between a degree audit and a job post. Vu began shaping the idea in early 2025, spent months on the plan, and wrote the software in her senior year.

She is blunt about the limit. “I think the role of advisor is irreplaceable,” she said. “It’s important that students work with their advisor.” The site is a first pass, not a substitute for a person who can see holds, prerequisites, and a four-year plan.

A 30 Percent Cut on Nvidia’s DriveSim

The person who built the translator already lived the outcome she is selling. Strategic class picks helped her land internships at Bosch Global Software Technologies in Ho Chi Minh City, her hometown, and at Nvidia, where she worked on the company’s autonomous vehicle simulation platform. Nvidia later offered her a full-time software engineering job. In June 2026 she was waiting on work authorization before she could accept it.

The co-op that led there was eight months, paid, at Nvidia’s Silicon Valley offices in Santa Clara. She found the listing on LinkedIn, did not expect a chip company to want a software student, and made it through two interview rounds. The offer email arrived while she was studying for finals. “I don’t even know if it was a happy feeling. It was just … unbelievable,” she said.

On the performance engineering team for DriveSim, Nvidia’s simulator for building and checking autonomous vehicle software, she benchmarked runs and wrote automation. Using Vue.js, Flask, and Docker, she and her team cut DriveSim execution times by 30%. “Automation is the most valuable skill I’ve learned,” she said. Nvidia’s public developer pages now group that work under autonomous vehicle simulation and validation tools that reconstruct drives, generate edge cases, and test stacks in closed-loop simulation.

CS major Jessica Vu is interning at Nvidia—yes, the $3.4T AI giant whose name means “envy.”

From Vietnam to Silicon Valley, she’s cutting DriveSim runtimes by 30% and learning from the best in tech.

Her advice? Never stop learning. Especially in tech.https://t.co/fgDqXh7OVj pic.twitter.com/Dkr6inMH9U

— Kennedy College of Sciences at UMass Lowell (@KCSciences_UML) July 17, 2025

The Kennedy College of Sciences posted that co-op note on July 17, 2025, while she was still in Santa Clara. In the same university profile she argued that hardware work is harder for AI to swallow than pure software. “If you want to work in a field where you know you’re not threatened by AI, then hardware is a good way to go,” she said. Hawk Advisor is software about software careers. The job she wanted sits on the hardware side of the same company.

Jessica focused on solving problems she had experienced firsthand as a UML student. What impressed me most was her willingness to transform that experience into a practical solution.

Sirong Lin, Associate Teaching Professor, Miner School of Computer and Information Sciences

Sirong Lin Pushed a Real Problem, Not a Homework App

Lin’s mobile app development class shaped parts of Hawk Advisor’s back-end architecture, even though the first version is a website. Assistant Teaching Professor Johannes Weis, who has known Vu since her first year, taught the cloud computing course that supplied technologies she treated as the platform’s base. Weis called it inspiring to watch her move from that first-year classroom into industry. “Jessica is proof that with dedication and hard work, you can reach your goals at UML and do extraordinary things,” he said.

Lin’s praise is specific. She did not treat the site as a class deliverable that dies at the end of the semester. Several students are already helping improve it. Vu wants university funding so that group can grow. She also designed the setup to scale, with other UMass campuses as a later target, and she has floated a mobile app if demand shows up.

Her own advice to international students is drier than the Nvidia story. “Start your work authorization early for an internship and make sure that you have all the paperwork that you need,” she said on her university profile. “That’s really important. That was the hardest part for me with my first internship.” The full-time Nvidia offer ran into the same paperwork wall in June 2026.

UMass Lowell’s New AI Major Names the Jobs

While Vu was shipping a student overlay, the Miner School changed the catalog. Students who entered in fall 2026 can enroll in an Applied Artificial Intelligence and Data Science major, a 120-credit bachelor’s degree listed beside computer science rather than inside it. University planning minutes from March 16, 2026, show the plan renamed from Data Science, with new AIDA course prefixes and a CIP code change.

The course list reads like the job board Vu was reverse-engineering. Machine learning arrives in the sophomore fall. An introduction to large language models lands in the sophomore spring, with a deeper large language models class in the junior year, then deep learning, vision language models, AI ethics, and a two-course capstone. The program page lists target jobs as AI and machine learning engineer, generative AI engineer, AI technical consultant, data scientist, and AI software engineer.

THE NEW MAJOR’S PUBLISHED OUTLOOK

• New England pay: Median annual salary of $142.2K for bachelor’s degree holders, from Lightcast, 2025, a regional mix, not the national BLS median.
• Regional growth: 8% projected job growth in New England from 2023 to 2035, also Lightcast, 2025.
• Credit load: 120 credits, with domain electives that can pull from economics or environmental science data courses.

THE BUILD CALENDAR

1. Spring 2021: UMass Lowell launches the computer science cybersecurity option.
2. Early 2025: Vu starts planning Hawk Advisor after hunting electives that match employer skills.
3. January 2025: She moves to Santa Clara for the eight-month Nvidia DriveSim co-op.
4. Senior year, 2025-26: She builds the site; it draws roughly 200 users within two weeks of launch.
5. March 16, 2026: Campus planners advance renaming the Data Science plan to Applied Artificial Intelligence and Data Science.
6. June 12, 2026: UMass Lowell publishes the Hawk Advisor story; Vu has a Nvidia offer and is waiting on work authorization.
7. Fall 2026: The first Applied AI and Data Science cohort enters under the new pathway.

Hawk Advisor still has work in that new world. The AI major is for students who chose it. Computer science, computer engineering, and applied math students who want a biostatistics detour, a QA path, or a front-end stack still have to assemble it from electives. The new degree names some of the jobs. It does not retire the overlay.

Who Inherits Hawk Advisor After Graduation

Vu was one of the flag bearers for the Kennedy College of Sciences at commencement. The speech she is leaving behind is not about Nvidia. It is about shipping. “When I was in my sophomore year, I didn’t know what project to build,” she said. “Having something that a student can work on and they can benefit from is a way that I want to pay it forward to people that helped me with projects.”

WHAT WE KNOW

• The product: A free AI site that maps careers to salaries, job-growth figures, and electives for three UML majors.
• The offer: A full-time Nvidia software engineering role after the DriveSim co-op and a Bosch internship.
• The parallel catalog move: A new Applied AI and Data Science bachelor’s for students who entered in fall 2026.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• Work authorization: As of June 12, 2026, Vu said she was still waiting on papers that would let her take the Nvidia job.
• Campus funding: She hoped to get university money to grow the student team; no award has been announced in the materials reviewed.
• Other campuses and an app: She said the setup could support other UMass campuses and a mobile version if demand appears.

The people with the most riding on the code are not the graduate heading to Santa Clara if the papers clear. They are the underclassmen already patching the site, the advisors she refuses to replace, and the first Applied AI cohort sitting in AIDA classes while everyone else still has to decode electives. “If we just have plans, it will always and forever be a plan, and nothing will be real,” Vu said. Hawk Advisor is the thing she actually shipped.