Academic excellence and passionate extracurricular interests have paid off handsomely for two incoming Waterloo Engineering students.
Mackenzie Collins of Bay Roberts, Newfoundland, and Colin Daly of Hamilton, Ontario, will each receive $80,000 over four years through the prestigious Schulich Leader Scholarships program for high school graduates pursuing studies in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Collins was a top student at Ascension Collegiate while also playing and teaching piano and violin, spearheading a school food drive, acting with the drama team, and excelling at national public speaking competitions in both French and English.
On one particularly busy weekend, she participated in contests in both of Canada’s official languages in Saskatoon and Ottawa.
“It was a whirlwind experience, but an incredible one,” Collins wrote in an essay that helped her land the Schulich scholarship to study biomedical engineering starting in September.
In addition to maintaining a 96.2-per-cent average as a French immersion student at Cathedral High School, Daly has been creating websites since he was 11 years old, and designs and builds 3D printers from scratch, an interest that has earned him honours in science fairs.
His enthusiasm for 3D printers, which he parlayed into a job making miniatures for a company developing scale models of Toronto and Hamilton, began in Grade 9 when he got a part made for himself.
Collins, who hopes to go on to medical school, wrote that she has “always longed to experience things beyond what my rural community in Newfoundland has to offer.”
Daly was also offered a Schulich scholarship to attend the University of Toronto, but opted to come to Waterloo because of its entrepreneurial spirit and reputation for innovation.
“The University of Waterloo has always been my dream school,” he said.
Founded in 2012 by entrepreneur and philanthropist Seymour Schulich, the program provides 50 entrance scholarships – 25 in engineering for $80,000, and 25 in science, technology and math for $60,000 – at top Canadian universities each year.
Collins and Daly are two of four campus-wide winners.