By @Newton, August 16, 2016
It is my pleasure to share some reflections based on my experience in co-op and applied research projects with university and business partners. This has been a big trend in Canada for several years. My personal experience with all of this really started in 2007, when I attended a math summer camp at SFU and learned about applied research funding programs. Right away, I organized a project with a local brokerage. This was big deal because it meant I got a position that normally went to Bcomm students. In no small way, I was an outsider at the brokerage. You can see more on my story here.
Even undergraduates can be hungry and capable of organizing exciting ventures, but I believe that co-op is missing a lot of this potential by focusing on sending students away from university to work with companies. Co-op is generally missing the potential to connect students work experiences back to their experiences at university, and all of the potential collaborators and funding programs available at the university.
Let me point out that this connection between companies and professors is happening with increasing frequency for graduate students since the rise of Mitacs, an important Canadian research funding agency. The ACCELERATE and other programs were designed to meet a mandate from the National Research Council for programs that could fund research projects with graduate students and business partners in all disciplines. I think it is fair to say that Mitacs got there before (and better) than the tri-council agencies, which may not be surprising given that Mitacs was essentially a start up government agency compared with the entrenched tri-council. The most important member of the tri-council in this discussion is NSERC and they seem to have attempted to match Mitacs' programs with the new Engage Grant. Without the gory details, I would simply say that the Engage seems to be moving towards a 'race to the bottom' situation that hurts the research community by reducing the cost of participation for companies, which lowers the value of the applied research for the people funding the work and distorts the attitudes of academics doing the work.
Before the rise of Mitacs, NSERC actually had an applied research funding program dedicated to undergraduates: the Industrial Undergraduate Student Research Award or I-USRA. This is the program I used to get a job at a brokerage as a math student. This program still exists but it is not well advertised or well used by universities, in my experience. The best chance to promote this program better is through the co-op offices. The co-op coordinators can use the program for leverage in negotiations with potential employers and can show students how to use the program to improve their odds of gaining good work experience during their time in co-op.
The new applied research funding programs are generally focusing on graduate and even post-doctoral students. The new Mitacs ELEVATE program is focused on post-docs and it allows them to supervise a team of researchers, which is moving in the right direction by encouraging collaboration and team-building amongst students working on for-profit ventures. Apparently, that is standard in some German technical universities (senior students supervising junior students with professors and corporate partners providing oversight). However, I believe that we are missing opportunities to include undergrads. Students are not well served by co-op experiences that send them to work at companies where their only connection back to the university is through co-op staff. The co-op staff are performing an important role, but the system is missing the potential to keep these students involved with their professors and other students while they are out on co-op terms.
There are examples of students whose co-op experiences built on their academic program in a way that enhances both. I encourage university administrators to find these examples and study them. I suspect it is because the students are highly motivated. Magic can happen when you bring a highly motivated person into a situation where they can bring together other high performing people. And that is exactly what I am proposing here: combining co-op for undergraduate with Mitacs for grad students, NSERC for professors, and even NRC IRAP funding for corporate partners. In this perspective, co-op can work with other lines of business to mutually reinforce all parties interest in working with highly qualified personnel. I believe this is a dramatically different vision that co-op can be better by becoming more connected to applied research and would be keen to discuss it further with people who are informed and open to discussion.
