by Robert Scalia

Neil Neville has collected only three As during his Concordia career. The rest of his grades have been all A-pluses.

Nevertheless, the 23-year-old mechanical engineering student was surprised when he learned he was receiving the Governor-General’s Silver Medal, awarded to the undergraduate student with the highest GPA at the university. He even made his sister read the letter just to make sure.

Neville was also awarded the Chait Medal, given to the outstanding student receiving a Bachelor of Engineering degree, and he has received non-renewable scholarships in each of his four years at Concordia.

He’s at a loss to pinpoint the secret to his success, insisting that he doesn’t study all the time. He tries to get plenty of sleep, and even squeezes in nights out on weekends. “I’d say there are a lot of people who take school more seriously than I do.”

However, school is his primary focus. He is already receiving funding from NSERC, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council.

Set on pursuing a master’s degree, he has been eyeing research in robotics and control systems. Neville said he would like to design flight simulator programs one day.

The co-op program at Concordia gave him a chance to work for Nortel Networks in Ottawa, where he conducted heat transfer experiments on certain network designs, and Keen Engineering in Toronto, specialists in the design of mechanical systems for buildings.