Gabriel Arcanjo's NJIT Journey from Student to Teacher to Graduate

Gabriel Arcanjo's NJIT journey took him full-circle, from attending a Saturday game development program as a high school student to teaching in the same program as a college senior.

Arcanjo graduates in the Class of 2023 with a B.S. in information technology and starts his career as an application developer for ADP, a giant in the payroll software industry and prominent sponsor of NJIT career fairs and hackathon events.

Highlander life began for him at age 17, when a friend at Kearny High School became a student in the Real World Connections program that lets Ying Wu College of Computing seniors teach technical skills to non-technical outsiders as a capstone project. The friend shared his enjoyment of the experience with Arcanjo, who signed up and found himself here on campus, learning the Unity game development software from a college mentor. Arcanjo was equally thrilled when the mentor showed him NJIT's virtual reality laboratory.

So when it was time for college applications, Arcanjo responsibly applied to several schools but knew that his heart was at NJIT. He wanted to be like his mentor, he loved the academic IT opportunities here and he earned a generous partial scholarship. And when the time arrived to choose his capstone project, he jumped at the chance to give back and teach in the RWC program.

"It really inspired me, especially that interaction with the senior who taught me back in high school, the fact that he took his time out to walk me over to the VR lab and show me in person, and now I'm one of the lab techs," Arcanjo said. "The idea of teaching a bunch of middle schoolers and high schoolers may not be that enticing for a lot of people, but that last day really made it worth it, the showcase day, when all of the kids' parents showed up to see their project. It's not as hard as it sounds. It is rewarding … to teach the new generation and have an influence on them."

Arcanjo said that as a teacher, he saw himself in one of the older high school students and was inspired to create a Discord server for his students to keep in touch about anything related to NJIT, virtual reality or just life.

Arcanjo said his favorite coding languages are the C family, including the original C, expanded C++ and Microsoft's C#. He also speaks multiple human languages, as he's fluent in Portuguese because both of his parents are Brazilian.

In game development, Arcanjo said he learned extensively from Senior University Lecturer D.J. Kehoe and was able to apply lessons from Kehoe's courses to his first internship with ADP, where he had to examine a code base, understand how the software worked and make changes. "At first it was a little bit daunting, but then I thought, wait, I've been doing this in DJ's class for the last two years," he noted. "That skillset is invaluable in the real world."

Arcanjo was also able to further his virtual reality interests here. He took two courses with Assistant Professor Margarita Vinnikov, in which he designed a Spiderman-inspired VR experience of swinging from webs along with an Avatar-inspired experience of manipulating objects from the ground. For the latter, his goal was to study the effectiveness of using gestures to teach with VR as the medium.

"I have been impressed with his passion for games, development and mentoring. He has worked on two outstanding projects, one of which is now being used during open houses, and the other has been turned into research. Gabriel will soon defend his undergraduate thesis, and we hope for a publication shortly after. Gabriel has been his cohort's great friend, colleague and mentor. He is a great success because of his passion, dedication and hard work," Vinnikov stated.

Regardless of what he's developing, Arcanjo said his favorite coding languages are the C family, including the original C, expanded C++ and Microsoft's C#. He also speaks multiple human languages, as he's fluent in Portuguese because both of his parents are Brazilian. In addition he credits much of his early career success to his fraternity brothers in Psi Upsilon.

Looking forward, Arcanjo said that his dream job would involve — no surprise — game development or virtual reality research. He may come back to school for a doctorate in VR research. "Prof. Vinnikov is very convincing and very persuasive," he joked. Even if it's a corporate payroll app, "I sort of discovered that at my core, I really do just like programming."