Here's how this University of Sask. grad just made 'history'

University of Saskatchewan (U of S) student Graeme Dyck has done something no other student before him has accomplished.

Dyck is the first graduate to win both the Earl of Bessborough Prize in science and the University of Saskatchewan Film Society Prize. He’s also graduating with both a Bachelor of Science and a Bachelor of Music degree.

This makes him the first student to win the school’s top awards simultaneously in sciences and fine arts.

“It's rewarding that after quite a lot of all this work that I put into it to be recognized,” Dyck told CTV News.

“I enjoyed everything that I'm learning, and it makes it easier to put a lot of work into it and also to have this information stick when you're learning it.”

He has also received the Arthur Collingwood Convocation Prize for top music graduate and the Haslam medal.

Dyck said he developed time management skills that helped him get all the work done, in addition to his extracurricular time.

“Musical practice and ensembles and such, in addition to schoolwork, there was quite a lot of stuff to get through.”

He also found opportunities to combine his studies, analyzing the structure of jazz harmonies for his honours thesis in mathematics, according to the U of S.

“By looking at topics from such different disciplinary areas, whether through music and humanities scholarship or through the very rigorous tools of mathematics and related kind of scientific disciplines, they can really provide a breadth of perspective and draw things that you might not otherwise notice by using only a single discipline,” he said.

Dyck plans to further his studies overseas.

“I'm doing a master's this coming year at the University of Birmingham in the UK, in music, that all kind of focus on electro-acoustic composition, and then some interdisciplinary research,” he said. “But I'll do further graduate studies after this. My goals are just to continue to build tools in a lot of different areas.”

He said he wanted to do work that mixed creativity and research.

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“That kind of brings a lot of different perspectives together and tries to get at new perspectives or new kind of new ideas by combining the methodologies of very different disciplines.”