 Thiessen
By Robie Liscomb
When Rei Thiessen was in elementary school in Japan, where he was born, his class wrote a simple computer program and he was hooked.
“I knew that someone had to write the program that told a computer what to do, but I was astounded that a person could actually do that,” says this year’s winner of the Department of Computer Science Graduation medal. “I wanted to learn how to tell a computer what to do.”
Soon thereafter he moved with his family to Victoria and continued his exploration of computers at home, primarily with graphics programs. He also became interested in discrete mathematics, a branch of math that has wide application in the field of computer programming.
At UVic, Thiessen’s interests led him to combine his computer science program with a major in mathematics. During his time at UVic he benefitted from several President’s Scholarships.
And the co-op component provided useful practical experience. Thiessen’s co-op work terms included a posting in Japan with the M2X telecommunications company, where he worked as a junior programmer on the company’s voice-over-internet-protocol (VOIP) products. Returning to Japan to work brought some linguistic challenges. “I had spoken Japanese at home with my parents, but my Japanese wasn’t really useful in a business setting,” says Theissen. “But my employers were very accommodating.”
“It was during my co-op work term at Safe Software in Surrey that I really developed as a programmer,” he says. He was a developer at the geographic information systems (GIS) company. “I could see a big difference between my early and later work there,” Thiessen explains.
Thiessen was contemplating employment immediately after graduation, but things changed when he took Dr. Nigel Horspool’s compiler class. (Compilers translate programs into simpler detailed instructions that can be directly executed by a machine.) “I found a field I was really interested in, and that class convinced me to go on to graduate school.”
Not only that, Horspool encouraged Thiessen to apply for a prestigious scholarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council, which he received and will be pursuing graduate work in compilers at the University of Alberta in the fall.
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