Most of the time, an internship offers someone invaluable practice experience in a particular field. Other times, an internship can lead someone directly into a permanent position. This was the case with David Pettifor (B.S. ’11).
Pettifor is from the greater South Bend region – he was born in Elkhart and grew up in Goshen – and in high school he had plans of studying meteorology at Valparaiso University. When that idea hit a snag, he pivoted to IU South Bend, where the computer science program was also appealing to him.
As soon as he dug into his first courses, he knew that he had found a discipline that was going to be a perfect fit.
“I realized that computer science was actually much closer to what I wanted to do,” Pettifor says.
He thrived in the classroom and before long he had acquired enough expertise to take a part-time job as a tutor. For two and a half years, Pettifor helped students with computer-science related problems pertaining to the understanding and implementation of a variety of algorithms, methods, applications, and databases.
During his final semester, he was also able to broaden the scope of his own mentors by serving as an intern at the University of Notre Dame’s Center for Research Computing (CRC). It proved to be a phenomenally good fit for his interests and his skill set.
“I thought, ‘I wish I could do this for my full-time job.’ I didn’t want to work on the same things over and over. I wanted to work on multiple projects, and that’s exactly what the CRC does,” Pettifor says. “We work on research projects here at Notre Dame, and we provide custom software solutions. It can be anything computationally intensive, from database management to web portal design, large data workflows – we do it all here. There’s a huge range of disciplines we work with, from biology to political science. There’s always something exciting.”
Pettifor’s natural knack for the job was clear to the management team at the CRC, and he was offered a permanent position as a full-time developer upon his graduation from IU South Bend in May 2011. He currently has the position of research software engineering manager.