Intern Spotlight: Nathaniel Callabresi
Internships are a critical aspect of a William & Mary education. No matter what a student is majoring in, so much can be learned by gaining real-world work experience. W&M Information Technology has a long-standing tradition of welcoming student workers and incorporating them into our overall strategy of providing a reliable, flexible, and secure technological environment that enables swift and skilled solutions for rapidly changing needs.
Nathaniel Callabresi ‘26 
Major
Computer Science and Mathematics
Intern Position
Workday Intern/Software Engineer
What were some of your duties as an intern?
I spent the summer of 2024 working for William & Mary IT as a Workday Intern and Software Engineer. I split time between these different fields within IT. While working with the Workday campus integration team, I created a website to consolidate all the Workday related links into one place. This website is a streamlined method for people to gather information regarding the ongoing Workday project. My experience on the Workday team was incredibly rewarding and interesting. I also worked closely with IT leaders to begin creating a W&M chatbot. I was able to use Microsoft’s pre-trained Large Language Model (LLM) paired with W&M information to make a tool that enabled website users to ask specific questions and receive an accurate response from the model. This tool is much more accurate than simply looking information up on Google, as you can enter natural language queries. In addition, I experimented with integrating Google Maps into the chatbot to get specific directions to campus buildings. Given my passion for software engineering, it was also invaluable to work directly with Phil Fenstermacher to remake the W&M redirect process. I created an easy-to-use program allowing different W&M departments to tailor redirect pages as needed, through a simple configuration file.
What were some of your biggest takeaways from your time working for IT?
My experience working in IT was incredibly rewarding. This is largely because I had the freedom to see the different sides. For example, the business side of IT was extremely interesting due to my technical background. Although I could still apply my coding skills to many of the projects I worked on, I also gained new insight into how platforms, like Workday, are applied to our campus community and the work that goes into making that transition as smooth as possible.
My technical skills also evolved through my experience using a CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery) pipeline. Through my work on the redirect process change, I assisted in setting up this CI/CD pipeline to allow for zero downtime. When designing a product dealing with thousands of users, it is extremely important to keep scalability and reliability in mind. Given the traffic on the website, it was also important to consider horizontal scaling, the idea of adding multiple of the same instances and thus preventing bottlenecks. We did this by deploying multiple of the same servers in order to reduce stress on a single server. Scalability and reliability are two extremely important aspects of software engineering that are typically overlooked. I am extremely thankful to the IT department for allowing me this hands-on experience.
