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There’s student-athletes, student media, student managers, but Harry Peluso might be one of the first student-engineers working on campus. Peluso is working an internship 10 hours a week with the engineering firm Shiel Sexton, who is building the new athletic facility on the east side of campus, Shields Family Hall.

Peluso, a senior civil engineering major, was interested in the history of architecture at Notre Dame. “I’m not a good sit down at a lecture learner,” he says, so he wanted to find a way to be more active in practicing the skills in his degree. Working with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences, Peluso developed his own course syllabus with deadlines for the semester for project updates with his contributions.

Each Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday morning, Peluso heads to the construction site. He takes pictures for reports, sits in on staff meetings to understand the cadence of a construction firm, performs quality checks on the work being done and writes reports to update his managers on site and in the College of Engineering.

Through posting about his work on his LinkedIn, Peluso was able to meet Jack Shields, the largest benefactor for the project and former linebacker for Notre Dame. Peluso hopes to make this program work so that other engineering students in classes below him could have similar opportunities. “I’m doing everything I can,” he says, to make sure the project reports, syllabus and work he’s done are approved by the College of Engineering for future use.