Sumun "Sumi" Pendakur
As assistant director of Asian Pacific American Student Services (APASS), Sumun “Sumi” Pendakur particularly enjoys “the substantive interaction” she has with students and the “chance to be a part of their journeys.”
To help students in skill building and career development, Sumi and two former career counselors at the Career Planning and Placement Center (CPPC) created a noncredit curriculum for Asian American students. Based on the success, evaluation and feedback, they came up with a model for other communities to use and adapt for their needs. Sumi and colleague Manisha Sharma recently shared their curriculum and findings at a presentation entitled “Collaboration for Change: Building a Targeted, Culturally Sensitive Career Development Curriculum” at the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA) and American College Personnel Association (ACPA) joint conference.
“Sumi is great at combining traditional student development with racial identity development processes and coming up with new programs or services,” says Jeff Murakami, director of APASS. “Her work highlights the fact that there really is no standard when it comes to student programming and that depending upon an individual student’s needs or a community’s profile, we need to adjust our expectations and measures.”
As APASS’s assistant director, Sumi manages 18 student staff members and handles some of the department’s service-learning initiatives. She also directs major programs for APASS including Positive Experiences, Enriching Relationships (PEER), a collaborative project with Student Counseling Services that matches APA continuing students with first-year students in one-on-one mentoring; Connections, an APA career mentoring program; and Critical Issues in Race, Class and Leadership Education (CIRCLE), an 8-week non-credit leadership development program. In addition, Sumi serves on USC committees involved in the community and the board of directors for South Asian Network and works on ongoing projects as needed.
Having worked at USC since December 2004, Sumi appreciates the opportunity “to be educationally or philosophically stimulated every day.” “To work at a place where you can be engaged on so many levels on a day-to-day basis is fantastic and thrilling,” says Sumi. “And to work with such wonderful colleagues across the division and university is so rewarding.”
Sumi earned a bachelor’s degree in history and women’s studies and a minor in Spanish from Northwestern University. She received a master’s degree in higher education administration from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is a member of ACPA and NASPA.