Chasing a dream

“While working as an instructional support assistant (ISA), I remember the first time a professor asked for a volunteer to teach a lecture while he was at a conference,” remembers Josué Kurke. “My hand shot up. I donned a professorial kind of jacket with the elbow patches and went all out. Over time, I’ve realized that I feel most at home in front of a classroom. I want to spend my career talking to people about math.”

Josué’s lifelong dream of becoming a professor of mathematics stems from grade 6, when he would spend his lunch hour solving advanced problems with a particularly dedicated teacher while the rest of the students were at recess. His experience as an ISA and a teaching assistant (TA) for the Faculty of Mathematics has only confirmed his enthusiasm for creating lightbulb moments. The role isn’t without his challenges, he acknowledges. He points to a time when he was tasked with helping a visually impaired student to learn programming concepts in a computer science course. “As you can imagine, programming with visual impairment is incredibly difficult,” he says. “Thankfully, the student was brilliant, and the experience really opened up my mind to new ways of teaching.”

Josué’s passion for teaching is matched only by his passion for math itself. “It may sound weird, but I find math beautiful,” he says. “There’s something mysterious in the way it all fits together.” Josué chose to study both Pure Math and Combinatorics & Optimization (C&O), which complement each other in terms of course overlap and shared content. “They each offer a slightly different approach to solving problems,” Josué appreciates, “and fields that I have found particularly interesting, like cryptography, incorporate elements of both disciplines. In so many ways, Pure Math and C&O go hand in hand.”

As Josué searches for the right place to attend graduate school, Waterloo has set the bar high. “You don’t just need to have a strong drive to succeed,” he believes. “You need an environment that nurtures and supports you along the way. For students with a passion for math, Waterloo provides the ideal environment to learn and explore possibilities.”