Meet Our October 2022 Graduands

October 03, 2022

Meet a few of our outstanding students who are graduating from the School of Computing Science from our October 2022 convocation!

JING YAN (JENNIFER) DAI

BSc with Distinction, School of Computing Science

What was a highlight or favourite moment from your time at SFU?
Some of my favourite memories at SFU were in the common rooms of student union groups. In my first years of school, I met many new friends and mentors through the Women in Computing Science common room. I also met many of the important people in my life through the CSSS common room.

How has your experience at SFU prepared you for your career path?
SFU’s focus on practical, hands-on experience in coursework and in the co-op program enabled me to gain the skills I needed to land internships and the work experience to get a head start in my career. This includes not only the technical skills but also soft skills like teamwork and leadership.

What advice would you like to share to students in their first year?
Make time to get involved in clubs and attend events on campus. After two years of online school, I regret not having the opportunity to attend more school events on campus. It’s a great way to meet new people and make lifelong friends.

What are your current plans?
Following two internships I did during my time at SFU, I’m excited to be returning to Google full time as a software developer working on one of my favourite products. I’ll be moving to the San Francisco Bay Area after graduation!

JEREMY FELL

BSc, First Class with Distinction, School of Computing Science

What was a highlight or favourite moment from your time at SFU?
The highlight of my degree was international co-op, working on research projects at two German universities through the DAAD RISE program. These experiences gave me the opportunity to explore exciting research, to meet great people and network internationally, and to travel around Europe. They also taught me valuable technical skills that I will take with me into my future career.

How has your experience at SFU prepared you for your career path?
My SFU experience has shaped my career interests, and my co-op internships have prepared me for pursuing these potential career paths. Through co-op I've been able to gain experience working in both industry and academic research, and in a variety of areas in computer science that interest me. These include cryptography, cybersecurity, compilers, computer networking and artificial intelligence.

What advice would you like to share to students in their first year?
My advice is to establish good study habits early and to get involved. These are equally important and will help you enjoy university. Good study habits will enable you to manage your time/stress, and getting involved (whether through hackathons, clubs, events, etc.) will allow you to meet people, learn about your interests and make your degree a fun experience.

What are your current plans?
After graduation, I will be seeking a position as a software engineer or machine learning engineer in industry, potentially abroad. In the future, after working in industry for several years, I would also like to return to school to pursue a master's degree.

Read his full story here >>

ALICE YUE

PhD, School of Computing Science

What was a highlight or favourite moment from your time at SFU?
I am proud to have worked with multidisciplinary teams on six high-quality publications. Seeing the dedication, passion and rigour everyone puts into their projects inspired me to continually improve the quality of my works. I was also fortunate enough to have been a part of SFU’s Computing Science Graduate Student Association, students’ voices and the Teaching Support Staff Union. The help and generosity of the community empowered me to pass on the kindness, shining a light on my time here - pun intended.

How has your experience at SFU prepared you for your career path?
Not only was I given the opportunity to take deep dives into specific computational topics, the SFU community has also cultivated my deep respect for understanding different perspectives on the same problem. These experiences taught me to think holistically about problems as systems. Taking these lessons forward, I aim to develop effective solutions that have positive impacts on the greater community.

What advice would you like to share to students in their first year?
Be confident and stay curious. Less generically, it is about the journey, but make sure to always have small concrete goal in mind before doing anything. If things change along the way, that is okay, but remember to celebrate the small achievements along the way. For example, a goal could be to finish a certain experiment in the next month.

What are your current plans?
I started working as a researcher at a Paris-based start-up called Metafora Biosystems in June 2022. I am excited to work with an ambitious team to develop high-quality and user-friendly software for computational biology. We’ll see where the world takes us!

Yue’s research focused on computational biology for single-cell cytometry data sets. More specifically, she works with dense lattice structures to help decipher the added layer of complexity introduced by data sets containing sub-object or cell-level information.