Absolutely. Thank you. The shortness of the statement made me choose what I meant to discuss, but I'm glad you asked it as a question.
Students are in every project we do. We're a college. We're there to educate students and prepare them for the life of success that they hope to have. Every project we do has students.
In some cases, it's done in their classroom as part of a capstone project, and they get a grade for it. For some projects, we hire the students, and it's their part-time job or their co-op term to work full-time on projects during that period. They work very closely with industry partners. They are part of the meetings with them and part of the designing of the solution. They learn a whole bunch of essential skills, like dealing with adults, keeping time, managing, understanding budgets and understanding what outcomes are and why they have to keep to those outcomes. They learn how to present and how to write in a way that is business-related and not so much school-related.
The students who work with us on projects learn a whole lot on the innovation side, as well as on the essential-skills side. I'd like to think they are readier to hit the job market once they graduate and are more innovative employees who can help companies innovate from the inside.
At Niagara College, we typically see between 1,500 and 2,000 students do applied research through our innovation centres and our capstone projects. We're a 12,000-student college, so a good proportion of our students participate. Many more could if we could undertake more projects, obviously.