Back to school
If you read this blog regularly, you’ll know that I’ve been a McMaster student for 10 years (reaching the end of my PhD now). Over those years I noticed that very few of my fellow students entered from high schools in the Hamilton-area, and even fewer of my fellow students remained to live and/or work in the Hamilton-area after graduation. A lot of my motivation for organizing events in the community has been to help catalyze a stronger local software industry, with the hope that more McMaster students would stay to live and/or work in Hamilton, and that more Hamilton-area high school students would choose a career in software development and ICT to pursue those jobs.
I’ve wanted to better quantify these sorts of things for awhile now. So over the summer I did a quick survey of students and alumni from my department at McMaster (Computing & Software) in order to determine:
• where the students of the department currently come from
• where the alumni of the department work after graduation
• how current students and alumni feel about living / working in Hamilton after graduation
I personally carried out the survey independently for my own interest, though of course I forwarded the results. I surveyed current students (51 total responses) by distributing the survey over social media groups (Facebook, LinkedIn) which should be considered a random sample of the population. I surveyed alumni (25 total responses) using my own network of contacts, which is not a random sample because it was mostly people that I have kept in touch with. The survey data was collected between Tuesday July 30th and Sunday August 4th.
Here are some highlights of the results:
Current Students
• 93.9% of current students come from outside of the Hamilton-area.
• 80.4% of current students live in Hamilton during their program.
• 90.2% of current students would be willing to work in Hamilton after graduation if a job in Hamilton with responsibilities and salary competitive with opportunities in other locations were offered to them.
• When asked using a 5-point likert scale how likely it would be that they work in Hamilton after graduation, the results conformed to a normal distribution centred on neutral.
Alumni
• The only alumni that are currently living and / or working in Hamilton originally came from Hamilton before attending McMaster (7 living here, 4 working here).
• Alumni salaries were reported from the $25,000 – $40,000 range all the way to $100,000+
I’ve always known that few students come from the Hamilton-area and that few stay, so those results aren’t too surprising.
But I found it very interesting that 90% of students would be willing to stay here given competitive job opportunities. To me that’s a signal that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong about Hamilton… there’s no Kryptonite in the escarpment producing a magic force field that prevents McMaster students from working here after graduation. While some cities are talent starved, Hamilton has a talent surplus. There’s a great opportunity for companies here to get access to some world class talent. And our talent is world class.
I also think it’s very interesting that the students that stayed to live and/or work in Hamilton are the ones that were originally from Hamilton. To me that’s an indication of what I think should be pretty self-evident: the better of a job we can do getting our children to pursue ICT fields, whether at McMaster, Mohawk or elsewhere, the better it is for the local ICT industry. McMaster’s outreach program is a gargantuan step in the right direction, reaching 1500+ Hamilton-area elementary school students this summer. It’s also great to see initiatives like the Mozilla-funded and GHGT organized SPY SCHOOL happening this September 7th aimed at providing an afternoon of fun filled technology related activities for Hamilton-area youth. The more of these events we can do around here, the better.
I strongly suspect that promoting ICT fields as a career path to Hamilton-area youth, developing their talents early on in these areas, and encouraging them to attend (ideally local) post-secondary institutions is one of the most important things we must do in Hamilton.
