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This year’s Convocation was one no one expected. The Class of 2020 graduated without an in-person ceremony, but not without celebration. The University handed out lawn signs for local graduating students, staff and faculty members, we designed downloadable signs in multiple languages for our diverse students and , and the entire University community shared congratulations messages.

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 ��ݮ��Ƶ 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 ��ݮ��Ƶ 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 ��ݮ��Ƶ 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 ��ݮ��Ƶ 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 ��ݮ��Ƶ. 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 ��ݮ��Ƶ 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.

��ݮ��Ƶ-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.

Shixiao Zhang is this year’s winner of the of the Statistical Society of Canada (SSC) which recognizes the best PhD thesis in probability or statistics defended at a Canadian university in a given year. His thesis, entitled “Multiply Robust Empirical Likelihood Inference for Missing Data and Causal Inference Problems," was written while Shixiao was a doctoral student in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at University of ��ݮ��Ƶ under the supervision of Dr.

When Shanku Niyogi (BMath CS ’94) learned about the ��ݮ��Ƶ , he knew he had to pitch in.

A result of the collaboration of campus leadership with the , the Student Emergency Support Fund provides short-term financial help for students facing unexpected expenses as a result of COVID-19.