alumni

Heidi Lam, who holds two degrees from UBC and two from Simon Fraser, has an impressive string of academic credentials, but she laughs off any suggestion that she’s a super-achiever. Instead, she suggests with quiet, yet focused, determination that she’s been seeking the best way to develop her intellectual interests while being true to her personality: a functional way to balance what she wants with who she is. For Heidi, a software engineer at Google, this search to date has yielded impressive results.

The display of an iPhone measures just 3.5 inches diagonally, yet as millions of iPhone fans will attest, it’s a portal into a vast world of apps, some 350,000 and counting at present. For the developers of those apps, it’s the space and place where inventiveness and savvy come together. For Hendrik Kueck, founder of Pocket Pixels of Vancouver, BC, the iPhone display represents the intersection of his passion for aesthetics and his intellectual interest in problem-solving, mapped to his desire to merge the two in fun and functional apps for consumers.

Born in Shanghai, China, David grew up wanting to be an artist. The joy of capturing the magic of his favorite cartoons on paper was overwhelming and creating his own collage has quickly taken over all of his past time. Unfortunately, and perhaps fortunately, like many kids drawn to the interactive world of gaming, David became hooked on Nintendo as a six-year-old. His goal in life to become an artist and create his own cartoon now has been taken over by the desire to make his own video game.

Saying that Juanita Lohmeyer has a passion for learning is like saying the sun has a passion for shining; it just seems to happen, without effort, and because it can. And because Juanita, a Program Director in Business Transformation & Technology Operations at TELUS, appears to move from one learning experience to another so naturally and easily, it's tempting to say she's known from the start exactly what her goals would be and where they would lead her. Of course, the reality of her life is more complex and interesting than that.

“Why do things in life if you’re not going to engage?” asks David Greer rhetorically, and if you talk for more than five minutes with him you’ll realize there are definitions to the verb to engage that are as yet unexplored by Merriam-Webster. For David, a 1980 UBC grad, computer scientist, entrepreneur and married father of three teenagers, engagement seems synonymous with hyper-intelligent professional focus, ferocious hard work, and an exuberant delight in life.