Student Profile: Dan (AccessComputing News - January 2014)

My name is Daniel Mooney, and I am currently a fourth-year (senior) student at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), in Rochester, New York. My major is information technology with an emphasis on mobile and web applications. I anticipate graduating this May. Following my graduation, I will be working as a technology analyst for Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Global Technology and Operations Division.

I chose RIT due to its strong emphasis in technology, job placement, and services for the deaf. I attended AccessComputing’s Summer Academy for Advancing Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Computing in 2011 and, through the Summer Academy, became very interested in web applications. Following that summer, I became a student tutor for the National Technical Institute for the Deaf computer lab for deaf and hard of hearing computer science students. The lab supervisor, Mark Wambach, hired me in the summer of 2012 as the developer for a web application that analyzed self-submitted student hours versus grade achievement. Through the summer work experience, I learned how to manage my own projects and focused my career interest towards web development.

For my last co-op in summer 2013, I was looking for an internship at a major corporation so that I could experience working within a business setting. I applied through the Emerging Leaders program at the National Business & Disability Council and was rewarded with an internship analyst position with Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s Global Technology and Operations Division. My duties were to facilitate syncing data on municipal bond rates across many different type of databases, manage the data so the queries could be performed at optimized capacity, and educate my team on the intricacies of Python’s memory management. Following the internship, I landed a full-time offer which I have since accepted.

In the fall of 2013, I went back to RIT to complete my senior year and further my unique interest in developing applications for business and information systems. I also joined MotionSavvy, a technology start-up concentrating on capturing sign-language through 3-D recognition hardware and software. As my career will begin in the financial service technology industry, I have expanded my interests to other types of web-based businesses.