Alumnus works on the future of video gaming | FIU News
Jose Maldonado is dwelling a everyday living most gamers can only desire of, functioning for tech huge Microsoft on the long term of online video gaming with the xCloud Team.
“My times consist of tinkering with the most up-to-date gaming know-how to improve the working experience for our people,” suggests Maldonado, who earned his bachelor’s in computer system science degree in 2017. “I get to participate in all over with prototypes and see how a match is designed from first strategy to ultimate buyer product or service.”
Maldonado says he was able to put together for and get his dream career since he thoroughly immersed himself in the Panther neighborhood and took gain of numerous of the university’s sources. In the course of his time as an undergrad, he labored as a analysis assistant at the College of Engineering and Computing’s Find Lab, joined StartUP FIU and finally co-founded established just one of the greatest scholar companies at FIU – Upsilon Pi Epsilon or UPE.
“I constantly knew I required to make the most of my school encounter and participate in corporations that were being aiding students provide tech to daily life,” claims Maldonado, who found his enthusiasm was generating experiential technological innovation, like the virtual actuality (VR) prototype he built in one particular of his courses.
Throughout his junior calendar year, Maldonado fulfilled Robert Hacker, director and co-founder of StartUP FIU, and observed the prospect to master extra about entrepreneurship and how to commercialize his development within just a local community of likewise-minded college students.
“From the minute I satisfied him, I understood Jose had a shiny future ahead,” Hacker claims. “His generate to develop exciting and immersive technology manufactured him a excellent in shape for StartUP FIU, which attracts our most imaginative and modern college students.”
Maldonado participated in the initially cohort of the Empower Accelerator, a 14-week plan aimed at helping early-phase startups start or grow. It taught him the basics of entrepreneurship, these as how to invent a merchandise, pitch his strategies and imagine clearly about what it usually means to create a know-how that people want to get. “It aided me immensely through my calendar year of interviews with Microsoft,” he suggests, “I imply I had to pitch to a panel of traders as a college pupil so absolutely nothing was extra terrifying than that!”
Though discovering about highly developed computing concepts, device learning and other know-how of the future, Maldonado understood a need to have to develop a pipeline for students who have been just setting up to find out about these fields. It was then that Maldonado, Cesar Villa-Garcia and a workforce of pals designed UPE for the duration of late nights in the places of work of StartUP FIU, a area committed to fostering the modern mentality needed to conceive and layout the world’s future fantastic startup enterprise.
“The purpose of UPE was to empower college students and connect them with options in the realm of tech, which is constantly increasing,” claims Maldonado, who also graduated from FIU’s Honors School. “StartUP FIU delivered UPE with the excellent room to foster a super-billed mental ecosystem geared to those people who want to triumph in tech.”
Maldonado just started a master’s software in finding out sciences and human growth at the University of Washington. He is hoping to use the competencies he acquired for the duration of his undergraduate a long time to get a lot more involved with educational tech, maybe in the VR area is he so passionate about.
“My schooling as an engineer meant I experienced a unique framework embedded in my intellect,” Maldonado claims. “At StartUP FIU, we realized it will take a whole other set of equally significant techniques to build some thing and carry it to current market.”
— By Irene Ferradaz