Computer engineering student Badri Widaatalla takes the code less travelled

Aug 25, 2023

Badri Widaatalla smiling and sitting with backpack and laptop under a colourful mural of the fibonacci sequence. — *Photo by Matt Volpe*

Award-winning Air Cadet Badri Widaatalla found his first year in computer engineering an exciting journey. While staying true to his small-town roots, he’s been exploring the fast-expanding, mind-bending world of coding. The Winkelman Admission Scholarship, created with a bequest from the estate of Wilma Winkelman, gave him a head start in calculus—which opened an unexpected vista.

As U of T gears up for the back-to-school season, Badri tells us his story.

Aviation was my big thing growing up. I really wanted to be a pilot.

So I joined Air Cadets partway through middle school and loved every aspect of it. The experiences and the memories are priceless. And I won the Lord Strathcona Medal of Excellence for being a well-rounded cadet—that’s very rare! I actually got it in Grade 11, which meant I could wear it on my uniform for a year before going off to university. I’m very proud of it to this day.

I’m passionate about entrepreneurship. I really want to be able to start my own thing and maybe bring something new to the world that hasn’t been seen before.

With all the COVID lockdowns, I had a lot of time to research things I was interested in.

One of those things being coding and software development. I looked into computer engineering and became really, really passionate about it. I liked how broad the field is and how you can work on anything—from defence systems to toy cars! I decided to go with the University of Toronto because I knew that there are great facilities here for entrepreneurship.

My parents always said I’m really logical in my thinking.

That carries over to coding for me; I really enjoy the fact that if something goes wrong, there’s always a way to fix it and learn from the mistake. I’ve coded some smaller apps for practice in my courses, like a BMI calculator or a game like Reversi. And I helped code part of the website for my Air Cadet squadron. I love the creative aspect of it as well—the many ways to approach the same problem.

I’m still volunteering. I stay true to my roots.

I’ve found it a lot harder to balance extracurriculars in university due to the harder workload. But I tried where I could, including taking intramural basketball just to keep fit. I also still went home to Cobourg every other weekend. I take an active part in the Muslim community there.

I’m passionate about entrepreneurship. I really want to be able to start my own thing and maybe bring something new to the world that hasn’t been seen before.

The Winkelman Scholarship has been an absolute life changer.

It’s just opened up doors. I met some great people at the start-of-year awards banquet, and I’m still friends with them to this day. And something more intangible: there’s no better feeling than feeling appreciated, like your work had actually helped people and was worth it. I’m very thankful that people like Wilma Winkelman are so generous and leave bequests to help students.

The biggest way it helped was I didn’t have to keep on with my part-time job for the summer before university. So I took Calculus One as an early-start course, and that was probably my best choice of the year. I loved that it got me into the mode of difficult university content. And it gave me space to take an elective in the second semester.

That was anthropology, and I became really passionate about it.

I found that it functioned like a break from the technical engineering courses. I like that I was using both the right side and the left side of the brain that semester.

Autonomous aviation might be the future, and I’d love to be a part of that.

I feel like I’m just going to have a passion for autonomous vehicles. But anything can change at any instant, like ChatGPT coming out of thin air and taking the world by storm. So, I’m keeping my doors open. I’m passionate about entrepreneurship too. I really want to be able to start my own thing and maybe bring something new to the world that hasn’t been seen before.