Programming ‘magic’ helps student land scholarship

Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Marks north of 90 and a passion for computer programming have earned a Waterloo Engineering student a national scholarship worth up to $22,500 over three years.

Corbin McElhanney, 19, now in his second year of the software engineering program, topped candidates nominated by engineering deans across Canada to win a National Engineering Scholarship for 2017.

Crobin McElhanney

Corbin McElhanney has won a National Engineering Scholarship from the C.D. Howe Scholarship Endowment Fund.

Established in memory of C.D. Howe, a prominent federal politician and industry leader who died in 1960, the scholarship is awarded annually to just two engineering students, one male and one female, based on academic performance, extracurricular activities and reference letters.

Already honoured to be the male nominee from Waterloo, McElhanney was thrilled to learn he had been picked as the cream of the crop of second-year engineering students nation-wide.

“I don’t really think about where I stack up next to other people,” he said. “I just go after my goals, so this is really, really cool.”

While compiling an impressive academic record, including several perfect grades, McElhanney also logged hundreds of hours as a volunteer organizer for Hack the North, the annual hackathon hosted by Waterloo Engineering.

He helped establish the event’s online presence as a front-end developer, then served as master of ceremonies as about 1,000 participants from top universities in 22 countries were urged on by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last weekend.

McElhanney was bitten by the programming bug at 12 or 13, when he got his first Macbook, dove into understanding how it worked and taught himself to write an iPhone application for a simple trivia game.

'I loved that feeling'

“The magic of writing this foreign language on a computer, pressing a button and having it compiled down in a very precise way to do exactly what you want was crazy to me,” he said. “I loved that feeling, so I kept trying to learn more.”

When it came time for higher education, McElhanney left home in Calgary to study at Waterloo Engineering because of its co-op program, emphasis on experiential learning and thriving tech culture, both on campus and in the surrounding community.

McElhanney himself is head of front-end development for a startup called Releaf, which has a web platform to spur growth by bringing buyers and sellers together in Africa as a trusted facilitator of business transactions.

As for his future, he hopes to use his co-op terms to help decide whether to put his skills to use within a large company, or strike out on his own as an entrepreneur. What is clear at this point is that it will definitely involve technology.

“Doing web development is like a dream come true for me,” McElhanney said. “It doesn’t even seem like a job. It’s still just an exercise of my intellect and my curiosity.”