Scott is studying software engineering at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in Rochester, New York. It’s a five-year program with co-op requirements. Scott has fulfilled those requirements by working for two different organizations.

The first is ANSYS, an engineering simulation company, where he worked for three summers as a programmer in the Meshing Development Unit. His responsibilities did not include getting coffee for his boss! On the contrary, he felt ANSYS made good use of his abilities and he was pleased to be able to contribute. Specifically, he collaborated with other teams to design and implement new features, performed and debugged regression tests, and wrote a variety of small utilities to assist other developers with code modification.

His second co-op was with SITO (Student Information Technology Office) at RIT. He was a member of one of the student-only teams that develops and maintains a major academic application used by several thousand students. Among other responsibilities, he got to architect a complete overhaul of the system, resulting in a dramatic speedup for users. He also had non-technical responsibilities such as leading meetings and reviewing resumes of applicants for the next team. It was a great experience that he really enjoyed.