#Software Engineering Grad Speech ##Ryan Fraser and Tylor Froese

##Introduction

• (Ryan) Hello to all students, professors, faculty and family. My name is Ryan Fraser,

• (Tylor) and I'm Tylor Froese.

• (Ryan) We are here representing Software Systems Engineering.

• (Tylor) It’s been a “fun” few years for most of us as the program has constantly changed around us. Our requirements have been shifted and changed, our classes added and removed, and we've guinea pigged a number of classes as trials for future years, but in the end we’re all here ready to graduate. I can’t help but look back and see that it was a fun ride, even if the ride was sometimes a little bumpy along the way.

##Thanks

• (Ryan) We would like to extend our thanks to professors who have spent so much time teaching us bright eyed, innocent and enthusiastic young adults before releasing us into the cold harsh wilderness of the workforce.

• Craig

  • (Tylor)First we'd like to give a big thank you to Craig Gelowitz for being the biggest force of change that this discipline has seen in a long time. He’s been working his butt off to keep the program relevant to where software is really going instead of leaving it behind in the 80s. But remember kids, if you take a class with Craig, make sure you memorize your lists!
  • (Ryan?)Craig, you were right when you wrote all the dollar signs in class to represent Microsoft, since we all know open source doesn’t actually make any money. But because of your enthusiasm and encouragement when promoting FOSS software, we open sourced this speech on github just for you
  • (Tylor) check it out at github.com/tylorf!

• Trevor

  • (Ryan) We would also like to thank Trevor Douglas for all his hard work teaching us our software labs. We would also like to thank him for going on sabbatical during our final year, leaving us with abandonment issues and years of therapy. We know you deserve a break Trevor, but I think those guys a year behind us probably deserve to be living in the danger zone more than us.

• El-Dareiby

  • (Tylor)We’d like to thank Mohamed El-Darieby who always tries to keep people engaged and keep the class interested through somewhat questionable, but hilarious, comics.

• Morgan

  • (Tylor) Next, we’d like to thank Yasser Morgan. He always does his very best to make sure that everyone understands the concepts he’s teaching, even if he has to individually ask every person in the class to do it.

• Chan

  • (ryan) Thanks to Christine Chan, a very kind, and an excellent educator. We wish we had the opportunity to take more of your classes during our studies.

• Abdul

  • (Ryan) Thanks to Abdul Bias, a great teacher and another professor we would have loved to have seen more often.

• Karim

  • (Ryan) And finally thanks to Karim Naqvi, someone who always tries to bring realistic elements into his teaching.

• (Tylor) We would also like to extend our thanks to the electronics faculty, who taught us our many electronic courses, and a couple special shout outs to some of the people who helped us the most. *David Wirth

  • (Tylor) We’d like to thank David Wirth, an electronics lab instructor, for giving us our intro to electronics in a way all us software folk could understand and preparing us for what we’d have to “deal with” (air quotes) when we got into Dave Duguid’s labs! *Dave Duguid
  • (Ryan) I guess we’d now like to thank Dave Duguid, since we’d never understand how a microprocessor actually works without him. Still though, it’s hard not to wonder how much we would actually know if he didn't spend most of the lab time laughing at us struggling.
  • (Tylor)One memorable Dave memory is when Conroy told me to model Karlee’s light up skirt for our electronics project class and Dave, pardon my impersonation it’s not my best, leans in and says something like “if ya tell ‘em it’s a kilt they can’t make fun of ya”

• (Ryan) Additional thanks to the rest of the engineering faculty, as well as the office staff who done a great job supporting us through our many years here.

##What Happened

• (Tylor) Throughout our time here we've seen a number of changes in the program that we’re so happy Craig has helped to push forward. He’s turning it into a software engineering program instead of a software focused electronics engineering program.

• (Ryan) We’re especially glad about the removal of Physics 201 as a required course. The justification may be that it wasn't relevant to us, but with a 50% fail rate we think you just wanted most of us to actually graduate someday.

• (Ryan) This has also been one of the largest graduating years of software engineering ever at the U of R. Not only that, but our graduating class has the highest percentage of female graduates across the entire faculty. Even with the gender ratio as high as it was it wasn't enough to help any of us guys get dates.

• (Tylor) Also, thanks to the department for giving us the App Lab. Having access to a quiet place that we can work has been a real blessing while working on our projects and other assignments. Not to mention those PC’s make for pretty good gaming computers, not that we would ever use them for something like that.

##Good luck

• (Ryan) To the future University of Regina software engineers, enjoy the new Software Engineering program. We can attest that it’s in great hands, as Dr. Gelowitz and the rest of the faculty have made some excellent changes during our time here, with more sure to come.
• (Tylor) To our family and friends, thank you for the support you've lent us over our many years of education. Without you we would never have made it to where we are now. And to the graduating class of 2014, it’s been a great journey alongside all of you. Good luck wherever the future may take you.