Meet Curren
Curren Iyer
Mentor & Senior Class Parent Engagement Lead
Meet Curren, a dedicated volunteer who has helped shape the Minds Matter experience for countless students in the Bay Area.
What Is Your Favorite Minds Matter Memory? My favorite memory from MMSF came at the end of junior year. That was my first year with MMSF, and I had stepped in as a replacement mentor for my mentee Danny. Since I had started entirely virtually during the pandemic, relationship building over Zoom had been a bit of a challenge. However, at the end of junior year we successfully enrolled Danny in a summer program (a video game programming workshop, as he is interested in computer science and loves gaming), subsidized by MMSF. When we had all the financial paperwork cleared we got this very grateful note from Danny's mom Louisa—she works pretty long hours at night as a janitor at SFO, so she isn't always able to be present for the MMSF programming, but expressed a really deep gratitude that we had gotten Danny into a program that he was personally very excited about. That exchange just really proved that this wasn't about helping individual students, but also uplifting entire underrepresented communities hoping to give their next generation a chance at a better future. That exchange was also the beginning of our connection with Danny's mom, which was invaluable in getting her involved in the college application process as a second enforcer of deadlines, a key contributor to the financial aid applications, and second pair of eyes on his essays.
How Have You Benefited Personally From Your Experience at Minds Matter? MMSF has impacted me in two ways. Professionally, as an aspiring people manager it has taught me a lot about how to expand my means of connecting with people to unlock their full potential. While I've been in lots of team-based settings before in school and in work, MMSF was an entirely new challenge (and opportunity) given I was working with someone from an entirely different background, in an entirely virtual setting, who was also a bit shy to a completely new person in their life dubbed their mentor. Gradually building the relationship with Danny and helping him 1) warm up to me and my co-mentor as a resource and source of support, 2) become more confident in expressing his very apparent curiosity about the world, and 3) achieve such an important life milestone like getting into a college he is very excited about have been quite fulfilling. I have since tried to incorporate lessons from my MMSF experience to elevate my peers in my day job and in my own nonprofit. MMSF has also shown me the standard for what organizational impact at scale should look like. I've always loved teaching and mentorship, and around the same time I joined MMSF I co-founded a nonprofit of my own called Techquitable, which makes careers in tech more accessible to students from underrepresented communities through mentorship from software engineers in industry. The MMSF team is very deliberate about the program structure and impact measurement, and has often been a source of inspiration as I seek to grow Techquitable into a similarly robust organization that can achieve such impact and meaningfully articulate it as well.
Give Us a Fun Fact I’ve visited 36 of 50 states in the USA! Trying to hit all 50 by 2025.