4.29 GPA: almost perfect
David Mamane doesn’t have a perfect GPA, but his 4.29 out of 4.3 earned him the silver Academic Medal from Canada’s Governor General, awarded to Concordia’s highest ranking undergraduate. “It would have been a 4.3 if it hadn’t been for a group project, but I’m not going to blame them,” laughs Mamane, an Actuarial Mathematics student. “It’s 4.299, or something like that.”
Mamane has accepted a full-time position in January at Aon, a company that creates sophisticated models to calculate risk for corporations. He will also be presented with Concordia’s Mappin and Eric O’Connor Mathematics medals at his graduation in June.
Four years ago, Mamane completed McGill’s pre-med program and was about to start at their medical school toward a career in pediatrics when he decided that math was his true passion.
“Straight out of CEGEP I went into pre-med at McGill. My CEGEP grades were great due to my math and physics. I don’t know why I leaned towards medicine,” says Mamane. “Don’t get me wrong: I volunteered in hospitals for three years during CEGEP and my first year of university. I loved doing the volunteer work and working with kids.
“I got into university and I could not stand biology and physiology at the university level. It was mindnumbingly boring in terms of memorization. It was just names and terms that went nowhere.”
Mamane switched into a joint program in biology and mathematics and graduated with his first BSc from McGill. Now, two years later, he has earned his second BSc at Concordia.
While some might think that Mamane’s high GPA was the product of taking an easy route, they would be wrong.
“I had four 400-level classes and an intense finance elective this last semester. I’m actually surprised I got the grades I did,” says Mamane.
Related links:
• Governor General’s Awards
• Concordia's Department of Mathematics and Statistics
• Aon Canada