Sarah Dagger
Why did you decide to pursue a graduate degree?
Ask me in the third year of my undergraduate degree whether I would ever pursue a master's degree, and the answer would have been a pretty immediate no. I had a job lined up and a clear plan. But then, in my final year, I took on a capstone project that involved working closely with the ReSeSS lab, a research group at UBC focused on making software more reliable and secure, and things changed pretty dramatically for me. Through that project, I got my first real exposure to research and found that I really enjoyed the depth of the process. There is something uniquely satisfying about being given permission to really dig into a problem and understand it from every angle, rather than just solve it and move on. One undergraduate thesis later, I found myself making the decision to pursue a master's degree, and honestly, I haven't looked back.
Why did you decide to study at UBC?
Working with the ReSeSS lab at UBC during my undergraduate degree was what initially convinced me that I wanted to pursue research in the first place. By the time I finished my undergraduate thesis, I had built genuine relationships with the people in the lab and felt I still had a lot to learn from them. Staying at UBC for my master's felt like the natural next step rather than a difficult decision. My supervisor and labmates have been a huge part of that. Beyond the lab, UBC is consistently ranked among the top universities in the world for software engineering research, and the department more broadly has a strong community of researchers working on problems I genuinely care about, which has made it a great place to grow as a researcher. It also doesn't hurt that Vancouver is one of the most beautiful cities in the world to live in.
What is it specifically, that your program offers, that attracted you?
The research-based structure was the main draw for me. I wanted a program that would give me the time and space to work on a hard problem in depth, and the MASc delivers that. I also think learning to do research well builds skills that transfer to pretty much anything: critical thinking, communication, the ability to sit with ambiguity. What I didn't expect to appreciate as much was the coursework component. Six courses spread across the degree has given me just enough breadth to keep things interesting, and some of the most interesting conversations I've had have been in those classrooms.
What was the best surprise about UBC or life in Vancouver?
I have now been living in Vancouver and studying at UBC for eight years, including my undergraduate degree, and the best surprise is simply that it hasn't gotten old. I moved here expecting to eventually take the scenery for granted, but I still regularly find myself stopping on campus just to look around. What caught me off guard was how much the city itself becomes part of your life as a student. Vancouver is the kind of place where your stress relief is a ten minute walk to the beach or a weekend ski trip, and that balance has meant more to me than I expected.
What aspects of your life or career before now have best prepared you for your UBC graduate program?
Doing co-op work placements throughout my undergraduate degree was one of the best things I did to prepare for graduate school, even though it had nothing to do with research at the time. Getting out of the classroom and into real software engineering work environments gave me a sense of what problems actually look like in practice, and that perspective has made me a more grounded researcher than I think I would have been otherwise, especially since my research area is how to make software engineering better. My undergraduate thesis also gave me a meaningful head start: learning to engage with literature, scoping a problem properly and sitting with the ambiguity that comes with working on something nobody has solved before. By the time I started my master's degree, I could focus on doing the work rather than figuring out what the work even was.
What advice do you have for new graduate students?
Find your people early, and don't wait until you're struggling to do it. Graduate school has a way of becoming isolating if you let it, and having a community around you makes an enormous difference, both for your research and your sanity. Beyond that, stay curious and protect that curiosity. It's easy to get caught up in grinding toward deliverables and lose the thread of what actually interested you in the first place. A graduate degree puts you in the rare position of getting to find answers to questions nobody has answered yet, and that's incredibly fun if you let it be.
Learn more about Sarah's research
My research sits at the intersection of software verification and AI-assisted development. I am interested in how developer tools can support human oversight as AI takes on more of the software development process, starting with the question of what gets tested and why. To address this, I am building Test Curator, a tool that extracts what AI-generated tests actually guarantee and presents them in a structured, comparison-oriented format. Through developer studies on real projects, I am working to understand how this kind of tool can help catch the gaps that automated testing leaves behind.