Industry committee  Good afternoon, everyone, it's my pleasure to join you here. Chairperson, honourable members, and witnesses, thanks for including me in this committee's activities. I especially appreciate the opportunity to appear by video conference and avoid the travel. I'm a professor from

Industry committee  Yes. We have the traditional graduate student, I guess, who has just finished their graduate degree or is maybe one or two years out. Our average age is I think about 27. We have students in their thirties and forties and actually even one or two in their fifties, so I think for

Industry committee  We're ourselves a copy of a program called ETC at Carnegie Mellon University. About three years ago, the University of Waterloo launched a program that's based in Stratford and is very similar to ours. It's called “master of technology and digital entrepreneurship” or something l

Industry committee  I'd say it's modest at best. For example, if you were hearing from schools of engineering, they would have a national council and a professional association and all that sort of stuff to deliver a coordinated effort. I know the people who run the other programs. We've gone to v

Industry committee  When I came into this position, a colleague of mine who also ran a professional degree gave me some really good advice, which is that my program needed to be industry-relevant but also had to be research-informed. If you build a program that only responds to industry, you end u

Industry committee  We have a stable financial model for our school. We have an endowment that helps support the school, and the tuition carries the remainder of the burden. Our tuition is probably too high. Interestingly, it's regarded as a reasonable price or a good price by Americans, Europeans,

Industry committee  The projects are paid and we have in-kind as well as a cash contribution that the industry actually pays, which helps cover the cost of the space and the instructors, and that sort of thing, and the equipment that the students might need. I regard this as a major indicator of ind

Industry committee  Well, because it's a one-year program plus an internship, it's effectively both. It's a year, and other than their internship student fees that are about $600, it's for the entire program.

Industry committee  Yes, that is a master's degree. But it's a one-year master's degree.

Industry committee  They tend to move into positions in about the $50,000-to-$60,000 range, mid-entry level positions, and then move up fairly quickly. Our students are typically earning about $80,000 to $90,000 within two years.

Industry committee  We have a scholarship program.

Industry committee  Yes, I had one student work for CSEC after graduation. It isn't a major focus of ours. We tend to focus on the part of digital media that's fun and entertaining. But, on the other hand, a key component of what we do is getting diverse groups of people to work effectively together

Industry committee  Personally, I've had to limit my research because of the administrative load of running the program, but we do maintain some limited research by virtue of our connections to our four partners. We are the national headquarters for something called GRAND, which is a federally funde

Industry committee  Yes. I called our projects industry projects, but in fact about a quarter of those industry projects are sponsored by research scientists, who use their research dollars to get our students to build things either at the front end of research—so tools, as you say, to unfold protei

Industry committee  You could probably take your list of the Hoover Dam, the space program, and automobiles. If anything like that were to be built today, it would be built first in a virtual way, in a 3-D model on a computer screen, and then realized perhaps in miniature with a 3-D printer, and the