For Katayoon Kasaian, perhaps the most exciting thing about the BCS program was the co-op program. She was placed at the Genome Sciences Centre (GSC) at the BC Cancer Agency, working as an annotator for the open source database the agency maintains. “And for me,” she says, “this was magical. It really clicked with me.”
When David He took professor the 314 graphics class, he thought ‘Oh my god, this is what I’m here for! That was the first time in my life when I stayed up for days without sleeping, working on an assignment." The excitement of that discovery propelled David into a co-op placement with Electronic Arts, then considered top in the gaming industry.
Andrew Ip had a spotty background with computers prior to entering UBC. “Most of my experience,” he says with a grin, “came through playing computer games.” In high school he had become interested in web development so enrolled in a CS class in the fall of 1999. What ensued ultimately led to his success.
When Elena Kholondyreva was 10 years old, she had a hankering for a Barbie-styled dollhouse. In her hometown in Belarus, such dollhouses didn’t exist. So, Elena decided to build one. “But it was a house with a difference,” she says laughing. “I wired it with electricity and had a little 10-switch panel that controlled the lighting in all of the rooms. It even had a glowing fireplace made with red lights.”
Through largely self-taught work in web design, Sohrab Shah realized there were “some interesting things going on under the hood,” in computer science. Sohrab decided to enroll in UBC CS for a second bachelor’s degree. After researching his options, he decided on UBC’s computer science department. Making this switch proved serendipitous to say the least...
