Winnipeg student wins $120K scholarship to pursue tech dreams at U of Waterloo

A Winnipeg high school student with a passion for technology has won a $120,000 scholarship to study at Ontario's University of Waterloo in the fall. 

Cherry Wang, a Grade 12 student at Miles Macdonell Collegiate, was one of 100 students selected from more than 350,000 applicants across Canada to receive a Schulich Leader Scholarship this year.

"I feel really excited, really happy about it because it is something that's going to help me and my family out tremendously," Wang said. 

"It's an incredible award. Without it, I probably wouldn't be at Waterloo in the fall this year."

Wang moved with her family from China to Winnipeg when she was in Grade 4. At the time, she spoke no English. 

Now she's mastered multiple coding languages and hopes to pursue a master's degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and work at Google one day. 

"At first, coding was pretty difficult. I didn't know what to do, but slowly I got the hang of it and I found it really cool that you can write just a couple lines of code and something incredible happens," Wang said. 

Computer science teacher Sam Adamson said Wang is an ambitious and capable student who has become a role model for other students interested in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). 

"I met Cherry when she was in Grade 9. She reached out to me because she needed help with her Chromebook [laptop]. Since then she's just grown into the tech leader of the school," Adamson said.

She said Wang is very involved in computer science extracurriculars and helps lead the school hackathons twice a year. Wang is also involved in the robotics club. 

"She's just such a fantastic student, a fantastic leader in the school," Adamson said. "I'm expecting to see her flourish in whatever it is that she's finding an interest in."

Wang said she's interested in pursuing multiple paths within the tech space, from electronics startups to app development.

Right now she's working on an artificial intelligence-powered productivity app to help people streamline scheduling. 

"I have many paths and many things that I have planned out. But currently, I want to go further in tech and gain more experiences," Wang said.