When Owen O’Malley was picking graduate schools, he chose UC Irvine’s Information & Computer Science because of its leading-edge software group and strong ties to industry. In software, it is critical to understand your customer and their use cases. Doing research is very exciting, but it is critical to combine the theoretical with the experience of industrial professionals. At UCI, with the guidance of his advisor Prof. Debra J. Richardson, he explored many different topics that proved invaluable to him in his career including program analysis, graph algorithms, distributed computing, and software architectures.