John Schappert

Class of 2026
Major in Computer Science

Hi I’m John - a senior interested in game development and entrepreneurship! I’m the founder of DPAD, Duke’s game development club, and I’m also very involved with The Cube, our entrepreneurship Living Learning Community on campus. With DPAD, I’ve worked hard to create a space for aspiring game developers at Duke by teaching workshops, bringing in guest speakers from the industry, and organizing large-scale cross-university game jams (hackathons for making games). Over the past few summers, I’ve had the incredible opportunity to be a professional game developer on commercial games like Mortal Kombat 1 and, most recently, Fortnite! Post graduation, I intend to join Epic Games full-time as a Game Systems Engineer on Fortnite, but it’s my dream to found my own game development studio in the future!

Favorite Class: Definitely Graphics Architecture (COMPSCI 345) with Professor Reed! Graphics are super important for game development, and Professor Reed taught me new C++ optimization tricks every class, many of which I am still applying again and again!