A bit like Sherlock Holmes
Computer science major Giovanni Peyo ’24 came to Skidmore sight-unseen from Haiti. One of his father’s friends, who was familiar with U.S. colleges, gave him a short list of possible places. Skidmore was on it.
Giovanni is the recipient of an S3M (Skidmore Scholars in Science and Mathematics) scholarship. The program was established to support students from underrepresented backgrounds as they pursue STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) disciplines at Skidmore.
Unlike Skidmore’s Porter-Wachenheim Scholarship in Science and Mathematics, which is application based, S3M Scholarships are offered to select students when they receive their Skidmore acceptances.
S3M graduates have gone on to become doctors, science researchers, teachers, engineers, and more.
Giovanni, who is passionate about cyber security, hit the ground running when he arrived in Saratoga Springs, independently seeking out a computer science internship in the spring of his first year. That same semester, he took an intro computer science class with his advisor, Associate Professor Christine Reilly, with whom he also did summer research analyzing the relative efficiency of the programming languages Java and Python. Along the way, Giovanni learned that computer science is a “vast field and that data science was not for me.”
Eager to gain experience, Giovanni landed a position during the summer after his sophomore year as an information security intern with The Baupost Group, a $30 billion Boston-based investment management firm. The experience equipped him with valuable insights into best practices, information security controls, and business continuity — knowledge he parlayed the following summer into a cyber risk and financial advisory internship at Deloitte’s Boston offices, where he was introduced to system resilience and cloud security.
Before going to Boston, Giovanni broadened his horizons by spending his spring semester studying at Budapest University of Technology and Economics and finding time to visit nine different countries.
Giovanni has a full-time job lined up at Deloitte upon graduation. “It’s ironic that my new passion is cyber security. In my younger years, I had so much fun jumping networks on online gaming sites. I guess the Sherlock Holmes in me cuts both ways.”
A version of this article first appeared in the spring 2024 issue of Scope magazine.