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Irene Melgarejo Lermas has never been one to shy away from a challenge. At the recommendation of a friend who studied at Waterloo, she moved from her native Spain to study quantum field theory at the Institute for Quantum Computing (IQC). In addition to tackling a complex subject in her second language, she was assigned to teach a class of 200 undergraduate students during her first semester. “I didn’t have any teaching experience at the time,” she remembers.

Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science professor Marius Hofert and David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science professors Sergey Gorbonuv, Gautum Kamath and Jian Zhao have each been awarded a Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Accelerator Supplement (DAS).

With some basic English, Andres Garcia Rodriguez left his family and home in Mexico to finish high school. He arrived first in Vancouver, attended a camp to improve his English. After he learned that there was a spot at a high school in Toronto, Rodriguez moved across the country.

Kerthanan Srikantharajah has always gone above and beyond. Whatever he could do to improve where he studied or where he worked – he would do it. That included doing as much as he could in one degree. Srikantharajah leaves Waterloo with a BMath, Honours in Actuarial Science with a Finance option, Joint Honours in Statistics and a minor in Computer Science.

To graduate in time, it meant he sometimes had to overload his courses. He added a sixth course some terms and took one or two classes during co-op terms.

Lily Wang always wanted to be an academic. When she was younger, she was involved in several math outreach events. This involvement introduced Lily to the University of Waterloo through the contests offered by the Centre for Education in Mathematics and Computer Science (CEMC).

For Alan Li, leaving Markham and the comforts of home wasn’t easy. Even though he was miserable the night before he left home, after his first week on-campus, he realized his worries were unfounded. He met a lot of new people and became excited for the adventure that lay ahead of him.

Li chose Waterloo because of co-op and the practical education of a computer science degree. With no previous coding experience, Li felt that he had a lot of catching up to do when he started classes and didn’t do a lot of extracurricular activity beyond Poker Club.

Early in his second year of medical school, Jose Luiz Avilez realized he wanted something different than medical school could offer. In his heart, he knew he wanted to study mathematics. It was a difficult decision, but by 2016 he was applying to universities.

“A friend of mine who studied at Waterloo told me about its program in Mathematical Finance and that it has a co-op program,” remembered Avilez. “I was sold.”

It took Ludwig Lie a while to get used to the University of Waterloo. Compared to Jakarta, it was cold, he was very homesick, and he didn’t feel like he belonged in the program he had chosen.

Lie chose Waterloo because it had the largest Faculty of Mathematics, and it had a co-op program. He knew his interest lay in finance, and once he discovered the Financial Analysis and Risk Management (FARM) program, he made the switch, and his experience improved.

Waterloo-based Inductiv Inc., an AI start-up that uses machine learning to automate the task of identifying and correcting errors in data, has been bought by tech giant Apple.