Changing the Game: How CS at Notre Dame goes against the grain
What do most people think of when they think Notre Dame?
Perhaps it’s images of “Touchdown Jesus,” Rudy, or the Mendoza College of Business.
But Notre Dame is more than football and finance.
While Computer Science might not be the first thing that comes to mind, for juniors D.J. Chao and Meghan Cullen, they’ve made the most of the unique factors that CS at Notre Dame has to offer.
And although it may not be particularly known for being a premier institution in the CS world, Notre Dame still offers a wealth of opportunity and potential for its students, especially in how its program separates itself from the rest. For both Chao and Cullen, one of the biggest benefits about CS at Notre Dame has centered around the cooperative aspect of the major, something more cutthroat technical schools may lack.
“It is very much a collaborative working environment … I think that’s very cool and generally as a class we like that,” Chao said. “I genuinely enjoy that my Operating Systems class has 80 kids in it, because it’s just 79 more minds that I can bounce ideas off of other than just the professor or the TA’s. It’s really helpful.”
“From what I’ve heard, compared to other schools our program is very collaborative and willing to help one another … we are always helping each other out, meeting in the library, working through things together, which is something I didn’t really expect but has been really great.” Cullen echoed. “We all have something we’re good at that we can bring to the group which is something that I think is definitely different from other schools.”
Additionally, both Chao and Cullen have utilized their respective backgrounds in CS to gain real-world, practical work experience, particularly through the problem solving skills they have learned while at Notre Dame.
Chao credits a large part of his learning experience to his summer experiences at Concept Capital Markets (now Cowen Group Inc.), a brokerage firm in New York. After shadowing a connection as a high school senior and being asked back to intern as a freshman, he took on a larger role and an important project this past summer.
Over the course of the entire summer, Chao built a core mutable database on his own, which helped remove and streamline a large amount of overlapping data from multiple departments within the company, with modular architecture that helped make finding key points much easier. The rising junior learned SQL and database architecture in the process, and credited his education so far as a huge help.
“I was able to look at what they had and have a better understanding of what was going on because I had better background knowledge, and especially because of the classes that I took,” he said.
Last summer, Cullen locally interned in the IT department at Dun & Bradstreet, an analytics firm based in New Jersey, as her first major professional step in figuring out potential post-graduate plans. Cullen worked with a team to fix troubleshoots and help prep job training, a job that helped lead her to her current status, as an incoming technology advisory intern with Ernst & Young.
“A lot of what we do in CS is problem solving, and it’s a big component of the work we do every single day,” she said. “I think that critical thinking and the ability to think through a really difficult problem piece by piece is something I’ve developed a lot through computer science.”
