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The summer that brought him back

David Carciente tested the fit of a lab before choosing graduate school.

David Carciente and fellow participants during his Rising Stars summer.
CampusDavid Carciente and fellow participants during his Rising Stars summer.Photo: Source: University of Waterloo; see original article for photo credits.

David Carciente joined Waterloo’s first Rising Stars Fellowship cohort in 2024 while studying software engineering at Concordia. In the Vision and Image Processing Lab, he helped make computer vision tools more accessible to marine researchers.

He returned for a master’s in Systems Design Engineering after getting to know the supervisors and research environment. His current work pairs satellite imagery with sea ice charts. The fellowship offered something a prospectus cannot: time to discover what working in a particular lab feels like.

Sources 1
  1. Original reporting · uwaterloo.ca
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This story is from the August 2026 issue of Alumni Digest · Waterloo. It's free, monthly and independent.

Alumni Digest is independent and is not an official University of Waterloo publication. Stories summarize the public reporting linked under each piece; photographs belong to the credited sources and remain under rights review.