When he first arrived at Dalhousie in 2012, Salman Mohammed was torn between majoring in math or chemistry. He knew he liked working with numbers from his high school experiences in Bangladesh, his native country, but was looking for a program where he could expand his knowledge of applied mathematics.
The Faculty of Computer Science was the perfect fit, and now Salman is graduating with a Bachelor of Science with honours in Computer Science and a minor in Mathematics.
“I knew Dal had an up-and-coming data analytics program and its own Faculty of Computer Science, which a lot of universities don’t,” he says. “It shows that they give a lot of importance to computer science.”
During his four years, he received a Schulich Renewable Scholarship, a prestigious award based on academic merit awarded to four students every year. He also received a Faculty of Computer Science Undergraduate Research Award in 2014 and the Bruce and Dorothy Rossetti Scholarship Gold Award for having the highest academic average in his Faculty from 2013-2015.
Through his studies, he’s developed an interest in algorithms, data analytics and machine learning. The subject matter inspired his honours thesis, in which he developed techniques to normalize data from Twitter and allow machines to understand paraphrased texts as humans would.
Outside of academia, he is thankful for the co-op opportunities and collaborative experiences Dal offers. “It’s not only learning new programming languages, it’s also about how you communicate with others, how you fit together in a team and how you can work together,” he says.
Salman is not yet certain whether his next step will be in academia or the private sector, but whichever he chooses, he hopes to use his knowledge in computer science to make tasks easier for people in their everyday lives.
The article is part of a series of profiles on members of the Class of 2016. Read all of our grad profiles. Spring Convocation takes place May 13 in Truro and from May 30 to June 4 in Halifax.
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