Part-Time Power-Up

It wasn't until recently that Joe Cruise (MSIT '25) realized he worked in information technology (IT).

He didn't envision being an IT professional back in 2007, when his work as an options trader for a capital management company relied on hand signals and scraps of paper. As trading evolved into a technology-driven system with hardware at its core, Cruise was also changing.

Today he is a trade systems analyst focused on systems integration at Belvedere Trading, where he is directly responsible for the design and setup of any new trading strategy. He's been with the company since 2016 and in his current role since 2018, but recently he realized he needed to further his IT knowledge.

That realization stemmed from Belvedere preparing to transition from being a mid-sized proprietary trading firm to competing with what Cruise calls "the big boys" of the industry. Cruise's primary focus is scalability, and with his company looking to expand its systems and offerings, he realized he needed to expand his knowledge.

"I got to a point in my career where I understood our systems, but I was trying to understand systems in general as we started integrating with more technologies," he said. "I wanted to understand why and how systems work, and I thought that more formal training was needed."

Cruise turned to Northwestern Engineering's Master of Science in Information Technology (MSIT) program for that training. He currently is a part-time student in the program and has immediately applied what he is learning in the classroom to his day job.

For example, the Computer Systems course taught by Alan Wolff helped Cruise understand why some systems don’t perform as well as they should. That proved beneficial as Cruise began to search for inefficiencies in Belvedere’s technology stack as the company prepared to scale its systems.

“That class helped me understand what scalability actually means in practice,” he said. “I wouldn't be able to be in charge of a project like what I’m working on if I didn't understand what I learned from his class.”

Networks: Applications, Principles and Protocols, taught by MSIT director Randy Berry, gave Cruise a deeper understanding of Belvedere’s real-time trade-writing pipeline, while Introduction to Statistics & Data Analysis with Professor Dongning Guo helped him understand how systems deviate over time and enabled him to develop smarter alerting systems.

One of the lessons Cruise was surprised to learn was how applicable lessons learned in the program can be, even as technology evolves at a rapid pace.

"The solutions that we talk about in class are to problems that are very old but are still applicable today," he said. "The problem is still getting data from disc to memory and how to do that as fast as humanly possible. The technology changes, but the fundamentals you learn in MSIT and the problems you're dealing with at their core are the same."

Going to school while working full time as a husband and father is challenging, and Cruise said he would not be able to do the program without the support of his family. He doesn't like missing time with his 5-year-old son, but Cruise said seeing his own growth has made the experience worthwhile.

"It's very hard to get up, go to work, come home at 5 p.m., be a dad and a husband, and then go do homework or in some cases take three hours of class," he said. "It's definitely made me more efficient. I have nothing but high praise for the program. It very quickly has made me better at my job."