Rossi: ‘Stubbornness’ makes for success

Filippo Rossi, this year’s winner of the IEEE Victoria Section Gold Medal in Electrical Engineering, credits stubbornness and a steady pace for allowing him to acquire an 8.35 GPA, the highest in his class. He doesn’t cram and he definitely doesn’t study through the night. “I’m usually in bed by 10:30,” says Rossi.

It was only three years ago that Rossi decided to return to school as a mature student, after working many years as a technologist in Ontario. “If it wasn’t for the Bridge Program, I wouldn’t have gone back to school,” says Rossi. The program, a partnership between Camosun College and UVic, credits previous college and work experience, allowing students to condense five years of study into three. Rossi found only one other similar program in Canada, at Lakehead University. For Rossi, the decision was not a hard one. He says he loves the West Coast, as does his wife; the two were married in Victoria last year, and enjoy sailing together in Pedder Bay on the weekends.

As for UVic’s electrical engineering program, Rossi gives it glowing reviews. He was pleased with the student to professor ratio (often 10:1 in upper-level courses) and found the professors very approachable.

With his steady pace, Rossi is continuing on to graduate school here at UVic’s Computational Electromagnetics Research Lab (CERL). In fact, he’s four weeks into his research already and planning to present a paper in Atlanta next month. He has a “good head start,” he says, because of specific research that began during an on-campus co-op work term under the supervision of his professor, Dr. Poman So. “Dr. So has been a great mentor,” says Rossi.

That work term and a subsequent class project was Rossi’s initiation into research on parallel computing, and he is now diving even deeper into the complex topic.

By adapting a 128-processor graphics card designed for the gaming industry, Rossi found he was able to increase the performance speed of an electromagnetic simulator that solves engineering and science problems tenfold.