By Erica Yee

When Daniel Russotto started at Northeastern University as an undeclared student, he had no idea the range of fields and countries his academic journey would take him. Five years later, the University Scholar has received a prestigious Fulbright award to study abroad in Spain.

Russotto (BSCS ’18) thinks of himself as a “liberal arts-minded person,” but decided to take the introductory Fundamentals of Computer Science class his freshman year.

“Even though it was really hard, obviously, I eventually decided that the process of solving the problems, and then the feeling that I got once I was able to successfully finish a problem set was a really satisfying feeling,” he explained. Russotto graduated in May with a bachelor’s degree in computer science and minors in English and philosophy.

After his first co-op as a front-end developer at Projector PSA in Boston, Russotto knew he was ready to try out a completely different opportunity. He ended up on the West Coast as a data platform software engineer at Intuit’s Mountain View campus, where he led a project focused on monitoring performance. This foray into working with data inspired him to apply for and complete an internship at Spotify as a data engineer before completing his final co-op as a full-stack web developer at Harvard Catalyst.

“Because of my co-op with Intuit, I learned that working with data and these technologies was something I wanted to pursue further,” Russotto explained. “That also prepared me as well because having industry experience was really important for breaking into this kind of space.” Around the time he realized working with data was his passion, he was also able to take the Data Collection, Integration, and Analysis class from the new data science major and Artificial Intelligence as his capstone.

When Dr. Jonna Iacono, director of the Office of Undergraduate Research & Fellowships (URF), reached out to tell him he would be a good candidate for a Fulbright, Russotto decided to see if there was a program that matched his interests. “I wanted to get a master’s degree in something around either computer science or data analytics, and I wanted to be able to go to a country where I can kind of speak the language. So that pretty much limited it to English-speaking countries and Spanish-speaking countries,” Russotto told Dr. Andrew Karas, the associate director of the URF. Dr. Karas found him the perfect match that Russotto eventually won — a program to earn the Master’s in Business Analytics and Big Data at Instituto de Empresa (IE) in Madrid.

Cultural dialogue is central to the Fulbright mission. While he’s in Spain from September through July, Russotto plans to participate in meet-ups in the data professional space and volunteer in the community through big data projects.

The immersion program will give Russotto plenty of opportunities to practice his Spanish. Russotto participated in a Dialogue of Civilizations to Peru the summer after his freshman year and returned as a teaching assistant the following summer. Throughout each of the five-week sessions, he spoke Spanish the whole time as he lived with host families and attended language classes.

“That’s something I’ve always wanted for myself, to be able to speak a second language,” he said. “The opportunity to go for a year now to Spain and really just be speaking Spanish as much as possible will really help me get there.”

Immediately after his Fulbright ends next year, Russotto has a job lined up at Intuit, where he completed his second co-op. “I’m really excited for that,” he said. “I know that their data team and data platform is really a great place to learn and grow, and also make a big real-world impact.”