If you’ve been present at the University of Waterloo within the last decade, whether staff, student, or faculty you’ll have encountered some of Mirko Vucicevich’s work. He’s the behind-the-scenes mastermind behind many of the web tools you’ve likely heard of: our course outline repository (outline.uwaterloo.ca), the absence tracking system (vif.uwaterloo.ca), and our student course perception feedback (perceptions.uwaterloo.ca). Members of the Science faculty will be even more familiar with his projects, as his team also wrote Markbox (bubble sheet software), Safely (lab safety checklists), Scinage (digital signage tool) and SciON (SIN and Avogadro Exams).
In short, Mirko’s been working hard to automate and streamline processes that save time and resources, both right away and long-term. He’s a big presence on campus, and his name and pixel-art avatar are well-known!
What many people don’t know is that Mirko is a University of Waterloo Physics graduate, and that he attributes much of his success to how the program helped mold him into the critical-thinking, problem-solving powerhouse that he is today. (Of course, his own personality and perseverance played a role in that as well.)
As I was interviewing Mirko he shared a fun fact:
I was accepted into a couple of Physics programs, but I actually chose Waterloo because of how badly I failed the Sir Isaac Newton exam. It was the first time I’d ever failed a test, and it convinced me that Waterloo’s program would be the most challenging option.
Hailing from a small town and bolstered by his stellar high-school academic record, Mirko admits it was “harder than [he] could ever believe,” and a very humbling experience. He carries with him a strong appreciation for the program and believes that studying physics produces individuals who are good problem solvers with a knack for critical thinking.
“Spending years submerged in problems that are sometimes way over your head gives you a toolkit of problem-solving mechanisms that can serve you well in any job or problem you can face in the future. My job might not have me determining spin on muons or doing hard calculus, but the underlying skills needed to logically solve those problems have transferred to my daily work.”
In his fourth year of studies, Mirko had a defining moment. He spent time working with Professor David Hawthorn’s Quantum Materials Spectroscopy group, which focuses on condensed matter, nano- and quantum materials, as well as X-ray scattering and X-ray spectroscopy. In his role, Mirko got a brief respite from theoretical physics and got to help design, assemble, and write code for some of the spectroscopy equipment. “I’ve always loved computers, and this was suddenly a different kind of challenge than what I was getting in the classroom. It was super fun, and something I was surprisingly good at... Unlike the 4th year Quantum Information course I admittedly had to drop.”
After graduating, Mirko looked at different job prospects and decided to lean into this love of computers. He spoke with Science’s IT department and secured a contract to assist in installing PCs in labs. He spent that time helping solve small problems, writing scripts and finding gaps that needed filling. When his contract was up he canvassed Science researchers and secured a role under Paul Miskovsky in providing additional research support and helping to optimize processes in Science; a role that eventually transitioned into permanent full-time software development.
Paul’s been instrumental in my success. He’s always let me take on big projects and given me full reign and responsibility for solving problems that came our way. Those first few projects defined my career.
The first of these projects was solving digital signage in Science. A side-project involving Raspberry PIs and web development, both new to Mirko at the time. “Honestly, it was a complete failure at the time, but there’s still some of the original DNA there when we tried again a few years later to make Scinage”. Scinage now powers many digital displays on campus.
Lessons learned in that first project transferred to the second: eValuate, a web-based platform to move pen-and-paper course evaluations to digital space. This time the project was a success – and such a success that it was picked up by other faculties and is now embraced by the University as the official Student Course Perceptions project. The projects kept coming after that, and Science Computing made a name for themselves solving problems across campus and improving productivity in surprisingly painless ways. It wasn’t long before Mirko was promoted to Lead Developer.
In one career highlight, Mirko’s journey came full circle when he was asked to put the Sir Isaac Newton exam process online. Now each year Mirko gets to witness thousands of students across the globe struggle against the notoriously difficult questions he himself failed miserably at, and that brought him to Waterloo in the first place.
In his role as Lead Developer, Mirko’s had the opportunity to hire several co-op students. He stresses that “physics students are my favourite pool to hire from. I may be a bit biased, but you can give a physics student a problem, and just let them chew on it, and they’ll just start working through it without much need of guidance.” He says that even when out of their depth, physics co-ops will go and find answers and only need gentle nudges when they get stuck.
“I love watching them come in from the trenches of physics homework and be given a tough business or programming problem to solve, and then see them slowly realize it’s way easier than anything they’ve been doing in class. They breeze through these things, and it gives them such a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction that’s entirely different than you’ll get from homework or an exam.”
Overall, Mirko believes the humbling and challenging experience of Waterloo’s physics program helped him gain a better perspective on life and lead to a carer he loves. He’s enamoured with the University of Waterloo’s “inherent nerdiness” and how the freedom of our faculty members opens so many opportunities for new interesting projects to tackle.
Every moment of my work is problem-solving; whether it’s high-level stuff like satisfying the business constraints of multiple faculties, mid-level strategy like positioning a project to perfectly fit an incoming policy change, or low-level stuff like optimizing an SQL query. There are infinite possible answers to all these problems, and my job is to pick the right ones.
To wrap things up, did you know Mirko is a huge Pokémon fan? Like many 90’s kids, he grew up in the era of GameBoy and Pokémon games. You may have noticed Mirko’s profile picture is a pixelated version of himself, and he has now introduced a new graphic of his dog, Tofu. Can anyone guess which Pokémon Tofu is modelled after, and which Gym Leader Mirko has the same pose as? Send our Alumni Engagement Office, science.alumni@uwaterloo.ca, your guesses!
