The Cansbridge Fellowship accepts a cohort of highly ambitious Canadian students to accelerate their leadership development each year. The Toronto-based organization, which is supported by Queen’s, offers these students a week-long conference in an entrepreneurial hub, a summer internship in Asia, and networking opportunities, along with a generous stipend.
Rabab Azeem, Sc’24 Computer Engineering, is one of its newest fellows, and has embarked on a 12-week internship in Seoul, South Korea.
“I heard about this fellowship in my first year because I really wanted to work in Asia,” she says. “I'm very excited to see how research in South Korea differs from North American research.”
Though Azeem is the sole Smith Engineering student in this year’s Cansbridge cohort, this wasn’t her first application to the competitive Fellowship program.
“When I got the email saying I got it this year, I screamed so loud that my roommates heard me. I went and told them what was happening. It was very exciting,” she said.
Azeem had planned to work as an AI research intern in Asia for the summer. She reached out to Professor Jaehyeong Sim’s lab at Ewha Womans University in September to conduct research at the AI Computing Platform Lab.
“AI has been something that that has interested me since high school,” she says. “More recently, I have been working on how to optimize ML processes through hardware and software applications. In Seoul, I will be researching how to increase the efficiency and sustainability of AI models.”
The first item on the agenda was a 10-day bootcamp and conference in New York. The conference included sessions on team building, pitching, and self-reflection. The organizers are also deliberate in building relationships between the fellows through fellow-led workshops, leisure activities, and a mini guided meditation retreat. The weeks following were spent preparing for the move around the world.
Prior to the conference, Azeem wrapped up a Queen’s Undergraduate Internship Program (QUIP) placement at the Privy Council Office within the Government of Canada. She had been working with their data science team for the past five months on a project leveraging large language models to improve various processes.
Beyond AI research, Azeem looks forward to the opportunity to learn the Korean language and work alongside people from other countries within the lab.
Once the internship is complete, she hopes to leverage the knowledge she gains for a future graduate program.
“I'd like to learn more about either on-device, sometimes called Internet of Things, and efficient AI models, or evolutionary AI models which are inspired by animals and humans,” she says.
