Tanner Hoke, a senior in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, received the Craig C. Brown Outstanding Senior Engineer Award, the most prestigious award bestowed upon a graduating senior in the College of Engineering at Texas A&M.
The award recognizes a student who demonstrates outstanding academic and leadership achievements and whose character exceeds standards.
"I'm extraordinarily grateful to Mr. Brown and the Brown Foundation for the award," Hoke said. "Mr. Brown gives to this university in so many ways, and he's given me and countless others an example to follow in exemplifying the core values."
A lifelong Aggie from Boerne, Texas, Hoke first garnered interest in computer science after developing a few iPhone apps in high school. With growing interest in math, theory and algorithms, Hoke decided to pursue degrees in computer science and applied math simultaneously.
"I like that computer science involves thinking about and solving difficult problems," Hoke said. "Of course, this is also true of math more broadly, but for me computer science is particularly exciting because often solving a problem means a new idea for an algorithm that you can implement and see the effect of immediately."
Hoke is the founder and president of the Aggie Competitive Programming Club, a student organization that provides a healthy environment to learn, practice and teach competitive programming techniques and algorithmic problem-solving skills for students of all skill levels.
He is also a member of Texas A&M's International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) team. The team recently qualified to compete in the 2022 ICPC World Finals in Dhaka, Bangladesh. They are the second Texas A&M programming team to reach this stage of the contest in the last 20 years.
Hoke is studying linear algebraic graph algorithms via sparse matrices and conducts research alongside Dr. Tim Davis, professor in the computer science and engineering department.
"My main focus is to implement a set of algorithms for quickly counting various types of subgraphs in a graph using SuiteSparse: GraphBLAS, which is an implementation that Dr. Davis has created, and which is widely used," Hoke said.
During the summers of 2020 and 2021, he worked as a trading intern with Jane Street. While there, he worked on trading strategies and models, building trading intuition, programming. After graduating this May, he will join the company as a full-time trader.
"In the long run, I hope to be someone who works hard, cares deeply about others, leads well and gives generously," Hoke said.