“I was searching for any available scholarships wondering what I could get with 1,000 hours?” Nolan Dey remembers the excitement and joy he felt the night he won the Future Aces scholarship in 2014.
“It was fun to be there and have my parents by my side,” says the current Senior Research Scientist. “It was nice to receive the money as a student heading into post-secondary.”
The Mississauga Secondary alumnus was committed to serving his community by organizing events at his high school while a student.
In 2012, he organized Carols for Cans, where close to 600 students would go door-to-door singing Christmas carols. Along the way, they collected over 10,000 food items and donated them to food banks within the GTA. The initiative ran for seven years.
In addition to community service, Dey also planned to attend university.
Inspired by an interest in math and physics, along with what he learned building different models with his friends, Dey decided to pursue a career in engineering.
He knew that while it would be a rigorous program, the field could open many doors, and push him to work harder. “I felt maybe some of the soft skills I could supplement, which is why I chose to do engineering.”
Dey graduated from the University of Waterloo with a bachelor’s and master’s degree in engineering. He went on to intern at seven different software companies, and along that path discovered a love of research.
“There are different ways to quantify what leadership could mean,” says Dey, who currently works at Cerebras Systems, which builds “the industry’s fastest AI accelerator,” according to its website.
He is considered a thought leader in the space and is responsible for leading different engineering teams within his company. Dey describes his role as helping “steer the ship for all these teams and put the company in the right place.”
In pursuing his dream of conducting research and creating scientific papers foundational to his work, Day hopes that it will inspire and “bring up the next generation to walk the path that I was able to walk, hopefully even better.”