For the University of Calgary
During the first year of my undergraduate degree, I was considered as a freshly started computer enthusiastic and underestimated since I hadn’t had any form of programming education in my high school, contrary to my colleagues having got into this field since their teenagerhood; However, that wasn’t going to last long. By the motivation, perseverance, and everlasting endeavors for learning and grasping the computer science curriculums, by the several months, I was amongst the top students and be considered as the individual that people can ask their questions on mentioned topics. At the end of my freshman year, despite my resume’s lack of written experience. I participated in a national game programming competition held in my university –“University of Tehran”- and was supported by the government. Surprisingly for others, I got awarded as the best programmer among many senior students and my craft was nominated for the best game of the event. With that has been my motivation engine, I began to challenge myself in any field of CS for the following years.
By the second year of my bachelor’s program, I was known as the person who could be a top on any path he took due to the excellent performance and score in my programming, algorithms, data structures, and related fields. I started to get involved as Teaching Assistant for my professors. I was TA for courses such as “Advanced Object-Oriented Programming (Java)” and “Data structures and Algorithms” as an instructor TA helping my professors teach additional topics to students in the fields; and TA for the course “Fundamentals of Programming (C++)” assignment reviewer TA. I am glad to be trusted by my professor to help them instruct their students. I the time was flying, I got into server programming with Java and Python as a side activity to my college. Subsequently, at the end of the second year, I got employed by my supervisor to get involved in a national project he was delegated. The project was to build an X-ray checking system to analyze the containers passing through the country’s borders. My primary responsibility was working as a server-side programmer (Java) alongside seniors to create an integrated global system to transmit data across the country to HQs in cities.
I now have started working in teams by the third year of the undergraduate program. As I was thirsty for learning and eager to grasp new areas, I began to work with the “Unity3D engine” and Virtual Reality programming as I had a background in game development. Therefore, for the college internship, I was accepted to work in the startup accelerator of “Sharif University of Technologies” – one of the top universities in Iran- as a VR programmer. I worked on an educational project, simulating situations and scenarios for the learners in an immersive Virtual Reality environment. After 3 months of internship, I was immediately employed there by the outstanding performance and creativity I had brought to the team. And for several months worked there as a team lead to manage and create VR scenes and scenarios. Until the final year of my university.
In the last year of my undergraduate program, by the experience and fantastic performance I gained in leadership during the past years, I have been elected as the President of the Computer Engineering Scientific Association of the University of Tehran (CESA). One of my remarkable works in the association was holding extra-curriculum classes and workshops, in which I had some lectures in the subjects of Game programming and VR development. Additionally, I was involved in helping my supervisor hold “The 11 Iranian and the first International Conference on Machine Vision and Image Processing (MVIP)”.
For the final graduation project, I created a complete 3D game experience. With various subsystems such as and elaborated “Third-person character controller with Dynamic camera perspective shifts,” a “Reactive shooting system” (having a unique act when shooting on different in-game materials), a “State-driven AI agents as the enemies” and developed various graphical shaders for the “Lamber’s model of toon lighting” and “Water shader with vertex displacement.”
Alongside the numerous activities, I have always been looking forward passionately to the new cutting-edge technologies appearing, such as the field of Virtual and Augmented reality, also known as XR. Therefore, I have done other activities in other laboratories and colleges of the University of Tehran. I was honored to work with the “CGC Lab, A Virtual & Augmented Reality Lab in Civil Eng” researchers by working on a thesis of “Structural equation modeling of pedestrians’ intention to jaywalk: A virtual reality (VR) experimental study” as a VR programmer. It is worth noting that all of my works and projects are listed with more details on my portfolio website, “payam-ranjbar.ir”.
As stated above, in a short description of my undergraduate studies, I eagerly pursue my passions in computer engineering with a mindset of craftsmanship. As such, I was looking for a graduate study; then, I found Prof. Moshirpour from the University of Calgary looking for students in the same field of study I was interested in. I contacted him and stated my willingness to collaborate under his supervision. After several meetings and test projects, I had a chance to have his acceptance of my study and research under his supervision and was offered a position in his lab and a Teaching Assistance job. I believe working with him and studying at the University of Calgary is a great honor allowing me the participate in research alongside the talented and pioneer people of the University of Calgary.
I have great hopes that I will attain significant achievements in my journey of life at the University of Calgary.
Payam Ranjbar