In the six years since he graduated from CCIS in 2009, Matt Horan hasn’t strayed too far geographically from Northeastern or Boston, working first at Berklee College of Music and then moving to New York City. He’s also held on to the lessons he learned through his four years at Northeastern.

“Ever since my freshman year, I was just fascinated with the way Northeastern was approaching computer science,” Matt says. “I felt that it was just very refreshing not to be at a school where I was focusing on writing code. Instead, I was focusing on solving problems and thinking differently. When I came to Northeastern, I knew how to use a computer and that it was interesting, but I didn’t really know that it could be a job, or what that would entail.”

Since that first spark of realization – that computer science is limitless, not limiting, in the opportunities it offers – Matt explored the field fully, completing two co-ops while at Northeastern, and even spending two months in Austria working with Erich Neuwirth, professor emeritus of statistics and computer science, at the University of Vienna.

Matt’s first co-op was at Wee Hours Computing, based in New Hampshire. There, he worked as a web developer. Looking back now, Matt says he could have taken on something outside his comfort zone for his first co-op – he’d also worked at Wee Hours Computing during high school. “I really should’ve tried going to some company where I would’ve really been challenged and forced to think outside the box and forced to work differently than I was,” he says. He did just that for his second co-op, which took him to North Carolina, where he worked at Cisco Systems, starting off as a customer advocacy lab operations co-op, before moving to advanced services providing technical support to large enterprise customers. The connections he made during that co-op are still a part of his life: “A couple of years ago, I went to Japan where I got dinner with one of the other interns who was there at the time,” Matt says. “That was a really awesome experience.”

After graduating, Matt worked at Berklee until 2011 before moving to New York City to join Livestream as a web developer. In 2012, he joined Pivotal Labs, a company that shared his passion for test-driven development and a systematic approach to programming.

He stayed on as a consultant there until 2013, when he and several coworkers joined a small startup, Kitchensurfing. The service connects people with chefs who come to your home and cook a meal. “I used it once for Arrested Development, season 4 – when that came out, I had an Arrested Development themed party so we had Arrested Development themed food,” Matt says, laughing. Matt was one of eight employees at the time, and worked as a web engineer.

Six months ago, Matt returned to Pivotal, this time in an engineering management position for the company’s Cloud Foundry project. “When I was at Pivotal before, I loved everything about the place – the test-driven development, the pair programming, all things that I believe in myself – but what I really wanted to focus on was enabling other people to get as much as they can out of the job as I have,” he says. This new position ticked all those boxes, and now he oversees a team of six working on Cloud Foundry, a tool used by developers to deploy software like web applications at enterprises that need to keep user information, like health data, secure from public access.

And when he’s not at Pivotal, you might find Matt in the cockpit of the Diamond DA-40 airplane he co-owns with another CCIS alum, Adam Kaplan. Matt and Adam were introduced by Adam’s wife, Rachel Ober, another CCIS grad. “A big draw for me was finding myself once again outside my comfort zone,” Matt says. “We decided to take our first lesson together, and got hooked. It was a tough challenge and took a lot of work, but I’m so happy that we both stuck with it.”