Mentorship plays key role in Vancouver grad’s success
Artificial intelligence has many life-changing applications, including helping people with speech differences communicate more effectively. For Northeastern Vancouver grad Ian Yip (MSCS ’22), getting to play an early role in Happy Prime’s AllSpeak software platform provided an opportunity to make a difference and receive mentorship from the faculty members who founded Happy Prime.
Yip joined the Align MSCS program after learning about the Vancouver campus. He had just finished his studies in economics at Simon Fraser University, and in the final years of his degree encountered ever more coding, data analysis, and math, all of which showed him the potential of computer science.
Yip offered some advice for prospective students considering the Align program.
“You’ll get whatever you put into it,” he said. “You are coming from a non-CS background and catch up fairly quickly in learning the processes and terminology. The more hours you put into assignments and projects early on, the better it will pay back later. Connect with your classmates, too. I made some lifelong friends at Northeastern, and you never know what you might do with them in the future.”
After two initial semesters of coding and mathematical foundations, Yip quickly hit the ground running in computer science. Two courses especially stood out for him: Distributed Computer Systems and Introduction to Machine Learning, where he would meet professor Aanchan Mohan, who would become a mentor for Yip and his capstone advisor.
Yip’s capstone research project explored automatic speech recognition for people with atypical speech patterns – helping lay the foundation of AllSpeak. Mohan and Happy Prime continued the research that they started together.
A short while after graduating, Yip made the change from his previous employment track at Canadian Western Bank into a role more related to his new degree. As a data engineer at Landcor Data Corporation, he now provides data analytics tools to financial services and real estate professionals.
“It was a great match for my experience with machine learning and data processing,” Yip continued. “They have a model for evaluating real estate in British Columbia which helps insurance agencies evaluate mortgages and loan approvals. I make sure that all the sales data is loaded and that our model is updated to reflect that sales data, prices, as well as any custom reporting from clients.”
Yip mentions the importance of attending industry events in Vancouver. He joined the Vancouver Board of Trade’s Leaders of Tomorrow program, where he got matched for mentorship with industry professionals in senior positions.
“It was a super helpful mentorship at the time I was starting my career,” Yip explained. “My mentor provided a lot of advice on different scenarios I was facing and how to deal with colleagues who might conflict with each other. Similar to projects in class where you might disagree, you now have to sit with that person for eight hours a day. The most important piece of advice he gave was that whenever you have to notify a manager of a problem, it’s always best to have a solution prepared. I’ve taken this advice to heart and it’s served me well.”
And Yip gives back, becoming a certified mentor with AI-powered Mentor Collective to pass the torch that Mohan handed him.
“I still pick his brain for insights,” Yip said.
By Benjamin Hosking