Felicity Foxx Herst, a dynamic young game designer with Silicon Sisters Interactive in Vancouver, is the daughter of a genomics researcher and a professional opera singer, Felicity grew up in a household devoted both to arts and sciences, so it’s perhaps no wonder that she gravitated toward a field that allows her to engage with her interests in both.
Dorothy Cheung’s resume shows an impressive list of educational and professional accomplishments. She’s worked in a diversity of UBC-based and private sector labs in Vancouver, including labs in UBC’s departments of botany, biotechnology, and pediatrics, the Centre for Plant Research at the UBC
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.”
“When I was in secondary school, I would have never thought of going into computer science,” says Homa Javahery. “I messed around on computers, but I was always interested in health sciences and there are a couple of doctors in my family, so I thought I’d go into medicine.” Attending McGill
Juanita Lohmeyer, 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 presume she's always known 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.
