Grad finds balance to be the winning strategy

Shew

By Amy Geddes

If you'd asked electrical engineering grad Geoffrey Shew a week ago to tell you his graduating GPA, he'd have told you he didn't know. It turns out Shew's 8.10 GPA ranked him as the top electrical engineering undergrad, which entitled him to both the IEEE Victoria Section Gold Medal in Electrical Engineering and the Andreas Antoniou Medal in Digital Signal Processing, which goes to the BEng graduate with the highest graduating GPA in electrical engineering with specialization in digital signal processing.

While some of his fellow students meticulously tracked and compared their GPAs throughout their studies, Shew tried not to obsess over marks—he had a different strategy. "I tried to stay balanced," says Shew. "I know people who study all the time and that would drive me nuts. I tried to focus on balance and I think that's how I stayed successful."

When he wasn’t studying, Shew could be found swing dancing (he’s recently joined a performance troupe) or working part-time at the UVic Computer Help Desk. But he also admits to spending many late nights working on assignments with his classmates—moments of camaraderie he found most memorable. "Our whole class would cram into a room in the engineering building to work on a project," he says. Shew holds up a circuit board that belongs to an electrical power meter back in his office and says, "This is just the kind of thing we'd be working on."

Shew works as a hardware/firmware engineer for Schneider Electric, a position he was hired for even before he graduated. Evidently his spirit of camaraderie has carried over from the classroom to the workplace; pointing to his bare upper lip he says he was reluctant to shave for the award photo because it compromised his chances of winning Schneider Electric’s moustache-growing competition.