Sholom Shuchat hopes to pursue a PhD in biomedical engineering.
“My wife, Malkah, is on maternity leave. There isn’t much income coming in,” says Sholom Shuchat, a second-year Concordia mechanical engineering student.
Fortunately, Shuchat gets student support at the Faculty of Engineering and Computer Science (ENCS) — including from the Jaan Saber, Phoivos Ziogas Scholarship, which he received in 2014.
“Being a teaching assistant helps,” says Shuchat, who tutors students on material failure, a first-year ENCS course that deals with mistakes within the profession. “I can either have really good grades or work more.”
Additional teaching assistantships aren’t an option for Shuchat, whose ambition is to pursue biomedical engineering at a PhD level.
Breaking the mould
Attending university in engineering was a real departure for Shuchat.
“My father and two older brothers are rabbis,” says Shuchat, a Montreal-born Hasidic Jew who completed four years of post-high school rabbinical studies in Pretoria, South Africa, in 2011.
After graduating, Shuchat entered the family business — Never Wash A Dish — which sells party supplies. “Business just wasn’t my thing,” he says. “I wanted to study.”
Shuchat enrolled in prerequisite courses at Concordia in 2012 — with his eye on ENCS — though he was aware his rabbinical studies didn’t align with engineering.
“My previous studies, even in high school, were more religious or of a religious nature. They prepared me for intense hours of study and deep analytical thinking,” he says.
To make up for the discrepancy, Shuchat taught himself secondary- and CEGEP-level math in the summer months leading up to his first semester.
“First I used Khan Academy,” he says, referring to a non-profit online learning resource. “I needed to pick it up, so I started reading books on pre-calculus.”
After a year of prerequisite courses, Shuchat entered ENCS in September 2013.
“I like engineering because it’s applied. It’s not theoretical mathematics — we solve real problems,” he says.
Shuchat expects to complete his studies in 2017.
