Dev Catalyst Alumni Spotlight: Knox Cavitt

Knox Cavitt is currently a senior at UT Knoxville, he completed the Dev Catalyst program back in 2016 and attended Liberty Tech High School in Jackson, Tennessee. The program helped Knox learn a lot about himself, and showed him that he wanted to continue working with computers into his adult life.

“My favorite part of the class was gaining the ability to build a website from the ground up. It's almost like an art - all of the programming that is, and I got introduced to it all thanks to Dev Catalyst.” 

While he finds his focuses and interests within the coding/IT world aren’t limited, he’s found himself zoning in on Cyber Security. He’s built some machine learning programs as well as computer networks. 

Summer 2021, Knox interned at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Scientists and engineers at ORNL conduct basic and applied research and development to create scientific knowledge and technological solutions that strengthen the nation's leadership in key areas of science; increase the availability of clean, abundant energy; restore and protect the environment, and contribute to national security.

His focuses there have been infrastructure projects, “as well as exploring cloud viability in place of on-premises hardware,” he said. He plans to take on a research assistant position at UT Knoxville where his focus will be on IoT security. 

Looking at Knox’s LinkedIn (which you can check out here), you can see a consistent trend of remaining in Tech related fields. Even if you don’t plan on going that direction after high school, Knox encourages students to try it.

“Regardless of the class, programming teaches logic and problem-solving. Worst case, you walk out knowing how to build a website from scratch and you have the website to show off or to mention in a resume.”