“I didn’t want to go to Waterloo,” Helen Dong says with a grin. “My older brother went here, and even though I look up to him I always wanted to do my own thing. But my mom convinced me I should go, and I’m so, so glad I did.”
Dong is this year’s winner of the K. D. Fryer Gold Medal, which is given to a student in the Mathematics Faculty each year who exemplifies both high academic standing and good citizenship.
She graduates on the Dean’s Honours List tomorrow with a Bachelor’s in Computer Science along with minors in Combinatorics & Optimization and Computational Mathematics. While Dong was initially reluctant, when she got to campus, she decided to approach her time at Waterloo the way she approaches everything: she gave it her all, with a smile.
Dong grew up in Mississauga, excelling in the Enhanced Learning Program at The Woodlands Secondary School, but she didn’t dream of becoming a computer scientist.
That all changed during the pandemic: her older brother, a software engineer living in San Diego who is seventeen years her senior, moved back home to quarantine with the family. “I got to watch him work,” she remembers, “and thought it was so cool. There was this one day when he was working on a Python script and I thought — oh, I’d like to do this.”