Connections after Khoury College: Two alumni meet at company Datadog 

Amy Luo and Edwin Morris led almost parallel lives, finding academic inspiration, long-term relationships, and career direction during their stints at Northeastern. Now, years removed from their time on Huntington Avenue, their paths have finally intersected.

Both Khoury College of Computer Sciences alumni now work at Datadog, a software company based in New York that monitors platforms for security breaches. Datadog’s software acts as an observability service for cloud infrastructure; customers can use it to monitor app performance, troubleshoot issues, and track user sessions, among other things.

This sort of work wouldn’t have been common ground for Morris and Luo had they not each changed academic tracks and acquired combined majors that suited their interests.

Morris was a combined interactive media and computer science major for his first two years at Northeastern but realized he was more inspired to design websites.

“It was in the logic and computation class that I figured out I didn’t want to do computer science exactly, or that it wasn’t my interest,” Morris said. “Instead, I wanted to make websites and I was interested in making websites look good.”

Morris switched his degree to graphic design but kept a computer science minor so he could still learn about front-end website development.

“Graphic design kind of seeps its way into making stuff on the web no matter what you do,” Morris said. “Khoury College definitely helped me refine what ended up being an important part of my career, which was front-end development.”

Unlike Morris, who dropped the computer science major during his Northeastern journey, Luo picked it up.

“I came into Northeastern as just a design student,” she said, “but that was the year they released this new combined major, and a lot of my friends were also in computer science.”

So in a typical college student fashion, Luo took a computer science course to be with her friends and ended up loving the subject. She switched to a combined interaction design and computer science major, accepted a co-op at Datadog, and enjoyed it so much that she went back after graduation. She still works with the same Datadog team that she started with.

Even though they took very different paths to get there and didn’t overlap at Northeastern for even a semester, both ended up with a Northeastern degree and at the same company. Luo is a software engineer, while Morris is a staff product designer. Because of the collaborative aspects of designing software aesthetics, they work on the same team — the dashboards team — to make the website and software look great.

“I get to use both sides of my combined major,” Luo said. “Even though I am a software engineer, I get to work closely with Edwin and other product designers. I get to implement cool visual features and a lot of the interaction design part.”

As Morris and Luo continue to find success in their post-Northeastern careers, they have also both found themselves still in romantic relationships initiated at Northeastern. Morris is married to a Northeastern alumna, and Luo is in a long-term relationship with the friend who initially convinced her to try computer science.

But aside from romance, Morris and Luo are grateful for the Khoury College education that set them up to have successful careers.

“I feel like [the Khoury College co-ops] gave me an opportunity to figure out what I wanted and didn’t want to do while in college,” Luo reflected. “Even though front-end development was not in the core computer science curriculum at Northeastern, after my first internship, [I took] something I was interested in and did other extracurriculars at Northeastern like Scout, where I got that experience, worked with designers, and worked on web-based projects.”

While most Khoury College friendships begin in the hallways and classrooms of West Village H, Morris and Luo both appreciate that they were able to connect at Datadog.

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