Kinori Rosnow didn’t plan on a career in machine learning or software engineering. He pursued a physics major in undergrad, but his courses in computational physics sparked an interest in programming. After spending time in Japan as an engineer — and as a member of the men’s national lacrosse team — Rosnow came to Pitt to pursue a master’s in information science while his fiancé enrolled in Pitt’s School of Medicine.
The opportunity to go to school with his fiancé came as just an added bonus, since Rosnow knows Pitt was the best choice to help bridge the gap between physics coursework and the career he wanted in information science.
“What was cool about the program was that it had the flexibility to be able to cover the things I had not covered, as well as build off of the things I had covered,” Rosnow says. “I wanted to be a little extra flexible because I wanted to cover some ground in the background I was missing.”
After covering that background, Rosnow began taking more advanced courses in the program, such as Cloud Computing and Enterprise Cloud Computing. The latter, taught by Sandra Brandon, discussed the big picture of how these systems operate and complimented the technical aspect of cloud computing he learned in the earlier course.
The summer between his first and second year at Pitt, Rosnow embarked on an internship with Microsoft, specifically on a team for Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing service. During the program, he ran into a problem with a part of his project. Luckily, he knew just how to solve the issue, because he seen a similar problem when his team in the Cloud Computing course accidentally broke its project. Noticing the commonalities in the challenge he currently faced, Rosnow followed a similar path in solving the problem at work.
“The basics of cloud computing, having that was such a big deal because I was working for a cloud computing portion of Microsoft,” Rosnow says. “I had the big picture and then a more small picture, and then I learned the really small picture on the job.”
This learning experience is emblematic of Rosnow’s time at SCI — applying what he learned in the classroom to real-world experiences and bringing lessons from those opportunities back to SCI.
Rosnow says a fair share of lessons have also come from connecting with other students. As he prepares to return to Microsoft and Azure upon graduating this spring, he’s thankful for the connections he’s made in such interesting classes at SCI.
“I made really good friends who are also academic and professional connections,” Rosnow says. “For the future, I can keep in contact with people and we can learn from each other even after we leave the school.”