Jean-Michel Lemieux, Shopify’s senior vice-president of engineering, launched the partnership at Carleton University on Oct. 12. Chris RoussakisCarleton University and Shopify, the red-hot e-commerce company headquartered on Elgin Street, have joined to develop a new computer science program that could change the way people think about post-secondary education in Canada.
The Ottawa firm and the university collaborated in an attempt to integrate both curriculum concepts and work experience into the degree program, which has been described as the first of its kind in Canada.
Students split their time between standard computer science courses at Carleton and working at Shopify’s offices at 150 Elgin St. Shopify builds online stores and provides point-of-sale systems for clients. In 2015, Shopify’s staff count topped 1,000, and the company powered about 250,000 online stores.
Students are considered employees of Shopify while at the office, meaning they learn course concepts but also apply them to real projects. To make the program as accessible as possible, each student enrolled receives a salary and has his or her tuition covered by Shopify.
Douglas Howe, director of computer science at Carleton said that the program is different than traditional co-op programs because it offers a degree of curriculum integration that traditional co-ops do not.
“Co-op students get lots of valuable work experience, but there’s really no connection whatsoever with the Carleton curriculum,” said Howe. “Shopify is making an effort to give students opportunities to see how what they’re learning in those courses is applied in an industrial scale.”
They call it “curriculum-aligned work-integrated learning.” At Carleton, the program is referred to as the Bachelor of Computer Science Industrial Applications Internship Option. Over at Shopify, it’s got a catchier name: The Full Stack Education Program.
“We designed this program with Carleton to give students the perfect mix of hands-on experience, self-paced learning and theoretical foundations,” said Jean-Michel Lemieux, Shopify’s senior vice-president of engineering.
This program is receiving government accolades as well. At the launch event at Carleton on Oct. 12, Navdeep Bains, the federal minister of Innovation, Science, and Economic Development, touted the program for its leadership and forward thinking.
“Programs such as the unique one launched by Shopify and Carleton will help students integrate more quickly into the workforce after they graduate,” said Bains. “In the process they will train for – and invent – the well-paying, middle class jobs of the future.”
There are currently 11 students enrolled in the Full Stack Education Program, coming from a variety of backgrounds. Six of the students are women, which is a number that people working on the project are particularly excited by.
“What I’m really proud of is that six of them are women, more than 50 per cent female in computer science is almost unheard of,” said Gail Carmichael, who leads Shopify’s external education team.
The students involved are seeing more opportunities than they had imagined. According to Sam Mitchell, one of the first-year students in the program, working at Shopify with other full-time employees presents possibilities he couldn’t have imagined before the start of the school year.
“I’ve already experienced more than I thought I would in my entire time being here,” said Mitchell.
The program has been well received so far, and there are already other plans taking shape for the future. Howe said that after two years of exclusivity with each other, both Carleton and Shopify hope to work out a model for adapting this kind of program for other companies and universities.
Programs like Full Stack Education, they say, can help better prepare students for the working world.
Carmichael said she hopes that the program will attract an even wider selection of students in the future. This year, as a pilot project, the collaboration was not widely known about among potential applicants.
“Next year I want to have students who will come across Canada – kind of the top students from across Canada,” said Carmichael. “We’re also really pushing to get some international students. We would love to see the types of people who would usually pick MIT or those kinds of places come here instead.”
Gail Carmichael – Lead of Shopify’s External Education Team.