Joe Jaconetta wasn’t sure what career path he wanted to pursue when he enrolled at Syracuse University in 2018, but he knew Syracuse would be a great place to find out. With so many highly regarded programs, surely he could find where he belonged.
“I eventually ended up at the iSchool, which was one of the best decisions I ever made,” he said.
While at the iSchool, Jaconetta concentrated in web design and data analytics. He fell in love with front-end development after taking Professor Laurie Ferger’s Intro to Web Design class, which he eventually returned to as a teaching assistant.
“The iSchool does an amazing job at preparing you with skills that you will actually use after graduation, such as agile project management, coding skills and public speaking, to name a few,” he said.
Jaconetta graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Information Management & Technology in 2022. He currently lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., and works at Synchrony in the company’s Bryant Park office in Manhattan.
Synchrony is a consumer financial services company that delivers digitally-enabled product suites for various industries including digital, health and wellness, retail, telecommunications, home, auto, outdoors, pet and more. The company employs more than 18,000 people.
Jaconetta works in Synchrony’s Business Leadership Program in the technology track, a two-year rotational program that exposes him to three different rotations in the technology space of the business.
“This has allowed me to grow a plethora of different developmental skills and has let me get a better idea of the kind of role I would like to take post-program,” he said. “Currently I’m in my second rotation, which is a front-end engineer role.”
For the past few months, Jaconetta worked on and recently completed a run-time manager application, which he coded from scratch using React & Typescript that will eventually be used internally by Synchrony’s front-end organization. The purpose of the application is to be able to read internal micro frontend data from Synchrony’s internal cloud platforms and then create a JSON object to be dynamically rendered on the intended host application.
“I was in charge of creating the UI/UX (user interface/user experience) for this application as well as the framework for the functionality of the app,” he said. “This project was meaningful to me because it was the first application I’ve ever developed to be used directly by Synchrony, and seeing it all come together was a great experience.”
Long-term, Jaconetta hopes to keep working at a job he loves and be surrounded by supportive people. He would also love to travel the world and own a yacht someday. As he continues working towards his goals, he encourages other iSchool students and graduates to reach out to him on LinkedIn if they’re interested in a similar career.
“Synchrony is a great place to work and we are always looking for iSchool graduates for our full-time and internship programs,” he said. “Syracuse has such a wide network of alumni at so many great companies across the country. This was definitely the case at Synchrony, which I think gave me an advantage when I first applied for the internship years back.”
He also encourages students to attend career fairs, get free career services help and ask for advice from Jeffrey Fouts, the school’s associate director of career services and data analytics.
“Mr. Fouts is awesome,” Jaconetta said. “I would also get involved as much as you can on campus, as employers are constantly looking for well-rounded individuals with leadership experience. It’s also a great way to meet people and make the most of your time on campus.”
