Koda Kol in the classroom
Cloud Computing Professor Koda Kol
Cloud computing, now available as a bachelor's degree at SMC
Koda and his students on a field trip
Koda at SMC TechUp
Koda, out on a bike ride
Koda with his students
Koda Kol learned about his family’s escape from Cambodia only in fragments, pieced together from questions his parents avoid answering.
He knows how in the late 1970s, as dictator Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge turned the countryside into killing fields, his parents were confined to a forced labor camp. When his mother discovered she was pregnant—forbidden under camp rules—staying meant risking death.
The young couple fled on foot toward Thailand. Others escaping alongside them perished stepping on landmines. Koda’s parents reached the forested borderlands with no papers and no money. Unable to cross, they subsisted in the jungle for months. Koda was born there.
“It was a dark time,” says Koda, who now teaches cloud computing at Santa Monica College. “We were very fortunate to be alive.”
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When the regime collapsed in 1979, Koda’s maternal uncle, a military man who’d been resettled in the United States, sponsored the family. Koda arrived in Los Angeles as a toddler.
While most Cambodian refugees clustered in Long Beach, the Kols lived in Wilmington, and later Carson. Koda’s father found work as a donut baker. His mother worked from home as a seamstress while raising Koda and his two American-born younger sisters. There were few Cambodians kids in those communities, and Koda was bullied in school.
He took it in stride. Being poor and picked on “was normal to me,” he says. “I didn’t know anything else.”
A sixth-grade field trip to the AT&T building in downtown opened Koda’s eyes to other possibilities. “It would be so cool to work in a skyscraper and ride elevators,” he remembers thinking.
Men in dress shirts and suits talked to Koda’s class about the future. They screened a video predicting thousands of TV channels—one for every possible subject. Back then, the cable box had just 50 or 60 options.
“And here we are today watching an infinite number of YouTube videos,” Koda says, smiling.
He was the first to join Carson High School’s technology club, later becoming its president. It was the late 1990s, the early days of AOL and dial-up connections. Koda learned about computer networks by volunteering his club’s IT support services to local elementary schools.
Right after graduation, he landed a job as a tech specialist with LA Unified School District. His supervisor taught Koda servers and routers on the fly, and when the boss abruptly quit, Koda stepped into his job. Pretty soon, Koda was running a successful consulting practice on the side. He started teaching courses in routing, switching and IT networking through the Cisco Network Academy, and went on to teach IT and computing at Roosevelt High for more than a decade.
Simultaneously, Koda was pursuing post-secondary education as a part-time student. He finished his bachelor’s in management information systems at Cal State Long Beach in 2007, and went on to earn a master’s in educational leadership at Cal State Dominguez Hills. He’s currently pursuing an education leadership doctorate at CSUDH.
Education and technology gave Koda a better life than he’d imagined possible. It let him pay off his parents’ mortgage and buy his own dream home. In his free time, Koda enjoys cycling long distances all across California.
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In 2018, he began teaching part-time at several community colleges, including SMC. Computer Science and Information Systems department chair Howard Stahl tapped Koda for the leadership team of California Cloud Workforce. The consortium was tasked with implementing SMC’s cloud computing curriculum—developed in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS)—across 20 Los Angeles County community colleges to reach a rapidly expanding pipeline of interested students.
In 2023, Koda transitioned to SMC’s full-time faculty to help build out California’s first cloud computing bachelor’s degree program, set to launch fall 2027. (See related article.) A cloud computing associate degree and certificate program have been around since 2010, and Koda has been teaching the lower-division Computer Science 79 A-B-C-D series for years alongside colleagues Vicky Seno, Fariba Bolandhemat and Jinan Darwiche. Outside the classroom, Koda spearheads the department’s Hackathon, Cloud Day and Tech-Up events and advises the student-run Corsairs Computer Science club.
“Tech was my way out of poverty. Now I’m able to pay that forward,” he says, explaining his commitment to teaching when the booming private sector is on a hiring spree and his professional skills are in high demand.
Companies of all sizes and across every industry are switching to cloud computing from the traditional IT model. More cloud engineers, solutions architects, DevOps specialists and cybersecurity analysts are urgently needed. The Bureau of Labor and Statistics forecasts 451,000 new cloud computing jobs within the next 10 years. The Los Angeles region alone sees thousands of annual job openings, and 65 percent of them require a baccalaureate degree. These occupations command median salaries exceeding $150,000.
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Koda’s students range from high schoolers to career changers, many coming from straightened circumstances like his own. With permission, he shares some of their success stories.
There’s Roxanna P., who couldn’t find steady work as a paralegal. After taking one of Koda’s courses, she landed a well-paid internship with Amazon’s IT Support division, which led to a full-time position as an AWS cloud support engineer.
Alberto L. pivoted from plumbing to cloud computing. He too landed a paid Amazon Web Services internship and then a full-time position thanks to Koda’s classes.
Kristian O. went from valet parking to tech support after just one course. With Koda’s encouragement, Kristian later passed the AWS Cloud Practitioner exam, which “made all the difference by putting me above the rest of the applicants,” the grateful student wrote in an email to his teacher. Kristian is now an enterprise server analyst with LAUSD, deploying cloud servers and databases across the massive school system.
Every so often, past students resurface on Koda’s social media feed. Recently, two messages popped up the same morning on LinkedIn.
“It made my day,” Koda says.
Jesus V., now a site reliability engineer with the State of California, wrote to say Koda’s course was “my launchpad for a career in cloud and software.” Matthew L., now an aerospace engineer at Lockheed Martin, wrote: “I made it! You were a very positive person in me being successful.”
Michael A. is coming back for more. He took all of Koda’s classes through dual enrollment, and landed a systems engineering job right out of high school. Michael is currently developing cybersecurity solutions for Shield, a business IT services platform. Like Koda, he’s eager for more post-secondary education. That’s why he’s applying to SMC’s bachelor’s program in cloud computing, whose inaugural cohort begins next fall.
The upper-division coursework goes beyond building cloud solutions to architecting and automating them, thereby cutting costs. And that’s the Holy Grail in the booming cloud and cybersecurity industry, Koda says.
After five years of planning, Koda is excited to see the bachelor’s program become a reality.
“My mission is to expand access to technology education and career opportunities for all learners,” he says, “so everyone has the opportunity, resources and support needed to thrive in the cloud industry.”
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Koda Kol’s life journey from a Cambodian jungle to teaching cloud computing at SMC
is a story of grit, reinvention and paying it forward. Read Article A free SMC noncredit ESL course helps adult learners build workplace communication
skills while opening doors to education and new career possibilities. Read Article Stockholm native Anja Winter developed her passion for psychology at SMC, leading
her to pursue a PhD and co-author a book on psychedelic science. Read Article Director of Library & Information Services Walter Butler did not have a ‘straight
path’ into this career, but he’s found his niche, helping students succeed. Read Article A Life Sciences prof. named elective member of the American Ornithological Society.
A trustee publishes a novel. SMC Malibu flourishes. Read Article CSIS Dept. Chair Howard Stahl on the new baccalaureate degree in Cloud Computing,
why it’s so relevant & what opportunities await students. Read ArticleSMC in Focus Volume XII, Issue 5
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