Student of the Year Award: Neil Thomas (Computer Science)

Neil Thomas, a fourth year Honours Computer Science student, is the joint winner of the Science Co-op student of the year award for 2009. This is the first time that a Computer Science student has received this award and Neil certainly deserves it. Neil’s accomplishments are truly amazing. Neil has maintained an impressive A+ standing (GPA of 97.6% ) throughout his academic career at UBC and has been an active member of the Department, where he helps other students via course mailing lists, newsgroups and WebCT discussion boards. He also is a member of the UBC Commonwealth club where he serves as the Vice President, the Director of communication and the Director of IT.

For his 5 Co-op work terms, Neil has worked at Safe Software and Google. At Safe Software, he worked primarily on backend infrastructure for data processing applications. For the remaining 16 months, Neil worked at Google, where he engineered internal tools, mobile applications and rich Web applications front-ends. Neil has worked on and launched multiple consumer-facing products that are being used by millions of clients. Neil has also utilized his communication skills at Google where he chaired meetings and gave presentations to his colleagues and Management.

His most recent supervisor, Derek Philips has said of Neil:
“I've been Neil's host at Google for 12 months and I can say with confidence that Neil is a truly remarkable talent. Having interviewed over 120 candidates and hosted 4 other interns at Google, Neil received the only perfect score I've ever given. He has been extremely productive, reliable and a pleasure to work with. He has far exceeded the bar that I had originally set for interns and I now evaluate all intern and new-grad candidates in relation to Neil. "

Neil has also been awarded the Google Internship Scholarship for 2009 and has an offer for full time employment. The Scholarship is awarded to a total of 80 interns and co-ops across all of Google’s worldwide offices and is valued at $10,000 USD. With his exceptional technical skills and abilities, along with dedication to excellence, he is sure to be successful wherever he goes and we are happy to have him represent UBC Science Co-op.