Just want to hear from Canadian parents who sent their kids to university in Canada. Did their kids get job offers through campus recruiting or via indeed / linked in. How difficult was it to get placed? What are starting salaries like? Was the college experience satisfactory and were the kids and parents happy with the final outcome.
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I can’t answer the job placement stuff, but as a non-Canadian parent, I am truly grateful that University of Waterloo admitted our DS. He applied to Computer Science (which is nearly impossible to get into in the US), but got a “deflected rejection” and was admitted to Math instead. Because transferring to CS is grades-based, and because he’s a very capable kid (that’s an understatement), he easily made the top of the transfer list end of freshman year. He has taken mostly Advanced level courses and been sufficiently challenged, and he’s at Grebel which is a small community dorm within the larger UW community that also hosts the music department, so he has access to pianos to practice with, is able to participate in the biyearly musical, and has a fantastic set of friends.
As for Coop pay, it’s on the lower side both in US and Canada, and it’s harder to land coops than you might think. He lucked out and got a senior level coop as a freshman because he had programming experience, had already taken the necessary upper-level math classes, as well as a college level algorithms class in high school. Essentially he got the job because of his high school classes, not his freshman college ones. The pay in Canada, especially for government coops, is around minimum wage in the SF Bay Area. You’d make more at In-n-Out burger.
I think though for starting salaries it’ll really depend on where your kiddo applies. Even in the US, the cost of living will determine starting salaries.
If you are a Canadian parent, then I have to say, the tuition price can’t be beat! We’re paying international tuition (which is still cheaper than US private school tuition), but for CAD kids, it’s a VERY affordable and excellent education if your kid gets into a good school. Classes sizes at UW in the math department don’t seem to exceed 120 kids even for lectures. Other departments can be a bit larger, but I don’t think DS ever had any lecture that exceeded 200 students.
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It is?? That’s news to me. No it’s not - and hundreds of , if not more, schools offer the major, and a big chunk of them would crave most anybody’s money.
I don’t care to have this argument on this thread, but yes, for high-achieving white/Asian males, it is tough to get into good CS programs in the US (especially pre-race lawsuit). UW admits based on merit and our experience for this cohort of kids is that most if not all of them have gotten in to UW (CS or deflected into Math) with or without Canadian citizenship while being waitlisted or rejected from the UCs.
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My daughters and I are dual citizens and live in the US. One daughter went to a small primarily undergraduate university in eastern Canada. She got a great education, with great internship / research opportunities, and saved bundles on the cost of education (graduating way under budget).
After graduation our daughter looked for jobs in eastern Canada and did not find anything. I do not think that she looked as far west as Ontario, and I do not think that her French was strong enough to look in Quebec. She was therefore looking at the maritime provinces and got nowhere. I think that she might have gotten two or three interviews through her university’s recruiting system, which led to nothing.
Eventually she gave up, came to stay with us here in the US, and started looking for jobs down here. She had many interviews, and got three job offers in five weeks (all roughly in the Boston area, which is strong in biotech).
I think that she found her first leads though on-line sources. Some of these got her connected to headhunters, who then put her in touch with other job opportunities. I don’t think that she found anything through the university, although her references were through her university connections including internships and research.
Once she started looking in the US, she had a lot of opportunities very quickly.
Better than we expected for a biology major. One issue is that she had gotten a LOT of lab experience when at university, and this lab experience was very similar to the positions that employers were looking to fill.
The college experience was excellent. The main downside was COVID, but that would have been a similar issue at the same time pretty much anywhere in the world. Other than COVID, she got a great education, got great research opportunities, had a good time, did very well, and got to see a bit more of the world. Any rumors of grade deflation that might impact a few of the best known universities (such as Toronto and McGill) did not apply to her.
And she is currently getting a PhD at a very good university in the US, in a program that is a good fit for her (with a roughly 3% acceptance rate).
If you decide to go this route then you can pm me and I can discuss a few details such as getting a Canadian passport, Social Insurance Card, driver’s license, a provincial health insurance card, and local bank account.
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Not at top schoo like CMU!
Op said they applied to CS. They didn’t qualify beyond.
And there are many white/Asian students at top CS Programs btw
So impossible it’s not but maybe OPs app didn’t make the cut.
And as I noted there’s many CS schools internationals of whatever ethnicity get into.