Nestled among the lofted classrooms, study areas and event spaces that make up Northeastern University’s downtown Vancouver skyscraper-as-campus exists a special opportunity to gain real-world exposure to the city’s bubbling startup scene
Students who gaze at the panoramic views through the floor-to-ceiling windows hundreds of feet above the city might literally bump into a local tech entrepreneur. Dozens of them frequent the halls each day to work on their innovative products and technologies.
The constant, informal presence of the tech entrepreneurs helps define Northeastern Vancouver, part of an initiative that in three years has transformed the campus into an interactive workspace and gathering place for more than 70 Vancouver companies.
In exchange for exclusive access to Northeastern’s state-of-the-art facilities, the industry partners commit to providing educational opportunities to graduate students – from career mentorship and co-op placements to direct recruitment to their companies.
“We teach fantastic degrees here, but if there’s anything which is critically important right now for students, it’s access to networks,” said Steve Eccles, dean of Northeastern Vancouver, in a recent interview. “The best way to do it is to throw yourself in, and what better way to do it than with a community that’s open to it?”
This embedded industry partner program manages approximately 150 workers from startups, enterprises and research groups. The organizations range from fresh startup companies to industry giants like Oracle, with priority given to those in fields with direct ties to the campus’s suite of degree programs.
Partners use Northeastern spaces for co-working, meetings, events and conferences, and in return create opportunities to work with students. For around 30 Vancouver students, the thriving on-campus network has resulted in a seamless talent pipeline from university studies to a relevant job.
Adrian Marcia, founder and chief executive officer of Aura Assurance – which uses machine learning to help auditors identify financial risks – joined the embedded partner program when it launched three years ago.
“These [students] are smart, switched-on people,” he said while seated at a table in one of the open campus workspaces.
Marcia was waiting to have lunch with Northeastern computer science graduate student Zhixiao Wu.
Marcia and Wu met as Marcia was seeking to hire a software engineer for his company. He appreciated Wu’s ability to offer software solutions even without history in the domain, he said, because it showed her to be an intuitive thinker with a fresh perspective on the finance industry.
Their chance connection on campus led to a formal job interview and, ultimately, an offer for Wu to join Aura as a software engineer with a focus on building new features for the platform.
“The program gave me my first software engineering job in Canada,” Wu said. “I’m getting real work experience while I’m still studying, and I get to use what I learn in class at a real job.”
Several floors above Marcia, co-founders Liam Ross and Daniel Shalinsky worked on their software platform Withe, which companies can use to organize virtual and in-person career fairs.
Weeks earlier, they had shared a co-op posting with Northeastern students and discovered Kelly Hsu, a computer science graduate student who had come to Vancouver from Taiwan hoping to one day start her own software company. Hsu had worked in Eastern medicine and acupuncture before enrolling at Northeastern, but surprised Ross and Shalinsky with her immediate understanding of their company’s mission regarding financial risks.
They gave Hsu a paid work test that asked her to use AI to create a tool that could pinpoint organizations in a given region best positioned to adopt their platform. She created a model that could score the organizations based on how likely they were to find interest in Withe’s offerings, then generate marketing materials that Withe could send out as a mode of outreach.
“It created this interactive site that I was able to apply [to Withe] immediately,” said Shalinksy, who hired Hsu in September.
Eccles, the Vancouver dean, said the hirings reflect British Columbia’s nimble, fast-moving tech culture. The majority of Vancouver companies have 10 employees or fewer, he said, making them highly dependent on people like the campus’s approximately 400 graduate students, who can quickly capitalize on big ideas.
“The tech community is also becoming more important to the profitability and digital transformation of [British Columbia’s] highly diversified economy,” he said, referring to tech’s increasing prominence beside the region’s long-established forestry, mining and manufacturing sectors. “The key foundation of that community is always the smaller tech companies, and the whole point [of the embedded partner program] is to build a very natural network that students can access.”
During his time as a partner, Ashkan Yazdi Zadeh, founder of internship search platform Intern Insider, has led mentorship sessions, hosted panel discussions and provided students with company data to use for a capstone project. He has also hired several students after serendipitous meetings on campus.
One introduced themselves to Zadeh while he was reading a book in a cubicle just before campus closed for the evening, and another expressed interest in his platform over the summer while they were watching World Cup games in a co-working space on the 14th floor, he said.
“I have never seen a university where you can get into a co-op like Oracle just by talking, not even by applying,” said Kalhar Pandya, a recent graduate hired by Zadeh as chief technology officer of his company. “It’s happening for lots of students.”
