Since becoming one of the four contestants on the CBC’s forthcoming special “Canada’s Smartest Person,” TRIUMF Research Assistant, Laura Suen, has been described repeatedly in the media as a “23-year-old student and gamer.” Having had the chance to sit down and interview Laura, distilling her into a handful of words is something of a shame, as she has accomplished much more than her age and the dubious title of “student and gamer” implies.
Last year, Laura was reading the news on the CBC’s website when she saw an ad for something called “Canada’s Smartest Person.” She recalled being intrigued by the rhetoric of the ad, which conveyed the message that one didn’t need to be the best at math or have received the highest grades in school to potentially be an intelligent person. This is because the game show uses the Theory of Multiple Intelligences—which divides intelligence into categories like Visual-Spatial, Verbal-Linguistic, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, and Logical-Mathematical—in order to measure a contestant’s intelligence. Seeing this, Laura said that she thought to herself “Okay this might be interesting for me to participate in because I think I’m social and I think that I have the math from physics and I think I have the linguistics from journalism and growing up, I was a visual kid, so maybe I’ll apply and see how it goes.” It went well. Laura said she received a call the next day and underwent a testing process in order to narrow down the number prospects, as over 1,000 people had applied.
While Laura’s experiences with the program are undoubtedly interesting, what is really striking about this “23-year-old student and gamer” is the disparate areas of concentration in her education and her interests and how they came to form a strong contender for the show.
Before pursuing her degree in journalism, with a minor in economics from Ryerson, and obtaining a double major in physics and cellular and molecular biology, coupled with a minor in mathematics from the University of Toronto, Laura played video games. Laura had earned tens of thousands of dollars using the virtual economies of Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG’s) to establish her merchant empire, all before the age of fourteen. Beginning at ten-years-old, Laura said, “In the summer, while kids were frolicking around outside, I was working the virtual stock markets. I was extremely wealthy in a lot of popular games like Neopets, Runescape, Diablo, and more. I was probably the wealthiest person to never have paid to play Runescape.” She had accrued billions of dollars in virtual currency and realized that other players would be willing to pay real currency for it. “I wasn’t even selling the virtual currency at a ridiculous rate; probably $0.50USD for a million [of the virtual currency]. But I had so much money on these virtual accounts that I was able to make thousands and thousands of dollars. I became really good at it. She had even hired characters—controlled by real people—to harvest a certain number of resources for her per day. “I remember 4pm ET was payday for the workers. I was like their boss in game.”
Laura recounted a story about her virtual business tactics that would make even the most seasoned stock market shark sweat: “I had so much of one good that if someone tried to undersell me, I had so much market share that I could undersell them and put them out of business. Because they couldn’t sell anymore; people would just buy from me and then I would raise prices again once they were out of business. I was doing this at an extremely young age. I realized it was extremely evil. That’s part of the reason I left. I stay away from MMORPG’s for a reason now.” That she would become a fierce and successful individual requires no great leap of the imagination.
At 18, she began a journalism degree at Ryerson University, where her talent for journalism was quickly recognized, as she became the youngest student to win an award that would allow her to pursue investigative journalism in Africa. “I decided to go to West Africa,” Laura said, “which is the most war-torn part of Africa and is just recently recovering from all the civil wars that have been going on. I had the opportunity to volunteer at a refugee camp in the outskirts of Ghana. I got to see the effects of civil war.” Her experience in Africa inspired her philanthropic side, and she set out to establish a charity called Over Bounds that would benefit the people in refugee camps, though the outcome was much larger than she had anticipated. “It snowballed from there into helping other people,” she said. “We currently support a school that is recognized by the United Nations World Food Program in Liberia, which is really exciting. There are 144 kids there, being supported by our program.” Though they seem entirely unconnected, Laura’s aptitude for the virtual economies of video games as a ten-year-old had a direct impact on the formation of Over Bounds. “I find making money really fun,” she said, “but I don’t enjoy spending the money. That’s kind of why I started Over Bounds because I found that I liked making money, but I don’t mind giving it away.”
While in Africa, Laura covered a number of different topics, but the ones that interested her most were related to human rights and science. In fact, she considers her science background as something of a happy accident that happened while attempting to become a science journalist. “I realized along the way that I would need a proper science background to be the best I can be in [science journalism].” She enrolled at the University of Toronto where double majors are required to graduate. She was already committed to cellular and molecular biology, so her remaining choices were between chemistry and physics. She chose physics, not because it was the easier subject for her. In fact, quite the opposite: math, an integral part of physics, had never come easy to Laura growing up and she wanted to challenge herself. Laura quickly became enamoured with the world of physics after discovering a number of interesting things that could be done in physics and physics research. One of the first physics labs she remembers hearing about was TRIUMF. “I made it a goal to be here one day,” she said, “and I’m lucky because I had the opportunity to follow through on that.”
At TRIUMF, Laura works in a group that hopes to add a laser system to the ALPHA project at CERN in order to work on two photon spectroscopy in the study of anti-hydrogen. Of TRIUMF, Laura had nothing but positive things to say: “It is one of my favourites, of all the places I’ve worked in because of the flexibility and the environment,” she said. “It’s amazing how they always encourage you to learn and if you make a mistake it’s not the worst thing in the world. In my other workplaces, I was always worried about screwing up, but here it’s a learning experience. I really like that, encouraging, positive atmosphere. That’s what differentiates TRIUMF from all the other places out there. It’s amazing. I love it."
Intelligence is a mercurial concept at best, and in the show it is easy to look at the competitors—a PhD quantum chemist, a spoken word poet, and a CFL linebacker—and assume what their strengths would be and, to Laura’s delight, most of the assumptions would be wrong. “You get pigeonholed growing up,“ she said, “so when people look at the four participants, they don’t realize that the thing that you’d think would be their strongest intelligence isn’t. I’ve always suspected that visual intelligence is the strongest of the six for me. I think that is the most shocking thing to people, because nothing in my resume has anything to do with visual intelligence or art at all. It’s kind of fun to shock people in that way.” Looking at her resume, one would not come away with the idea that she would be as well rounded as she is. However, having delved into her background and considered her experiences, it is no surprise. Every experience in Laura’s story seems to dovetail into the other, creating someone who seems tailor-made for this competition.
But don’t be deceived by the perfect-looking chain of events, Laura laughs. “You should see the stack of failures and rejections. I actually keep all of them just to build character. [The stack] is still building. I’m only 20-something, so it’s building quite a lot.”
For people eager to succeed as she has, she offers some advice: “Having a sense of humour really helps, just being able to laugh it off and say ‘oh well.’ I laugh at myself all the time. Being flexible is amazing. Everyone can find 27 hours in a day, if you’re really passionate about something. I try to do creative writing on the side and so, I finally finished my novel and I’m starting to share it with people, too. I found the time. Being tenacious enough to go for what you want and create a clear plan and having a sense of humor and flexibility to work around any kinks. You have to bend a bit in order for everything to fit.”
Laura was the runner-up in the "Canada's Smartest Person" challenge, placing ahead of spoken word artist, Greg Frankson, and high-school science teacher, Marshall Carroll. The title of Canada's Smartest Person went to Hamilton Tiger-Cats defensive linebacker, Peter Dyakowski.
Congratulations, Laura!
Missed the show? Watch it here.
--Written by Jordan Pitcher, Communications Assistant