Hi. Unfortunately, I didn't make much time to get involved with this committee this term, but thanks for letting me get involved with the University Fair. I actually have some opinions about what I think could be improved with the recruiting strategy (which is why I wanted to be involved in the first place) and I thought I'd post it here in case anyone is interested.

I think the CS program here is really great. I'm having an amazing time, and me and my friends are taking advantages of amazing opportunities during coop. However, I think we could be doing much more to show how good the program and coop is. For example, hypothetically, if prospective students were to see the co-op job list when you search for CS in Jobmine, they would be amazed. But coop is not emphasized very much in any of the recruiting material or the website. Most upper year students and some younger students have amazing jobs, much better than the "sample coop jobs" listed. Even by listing coop salaries, many prospective students would be impressed. The same applies to new graduates and their jobs. There are so many amazing success stories from coop and graduates that I personally have come across. I can see that one disadvantage of showing how good our coop program is, which is that students may expect too much from coop and be disappointed in the first term, so that's a potential problem. But overall, I feel that this huge selling point is understated. It is unfair to set expectations for coops or graduate jobs unrealistically high, but currently I think it is understated, and lower than reality.

Currently, some graduate profiles are used in the promotional material, but no coop student profiles are used (I think I saw it in engineering brouchures though). The new promotional materials cite statistics talking about the IT industry, and stats are great, but examples work too since they are sometimes more interesting and work more on a personal level. Also, as a high school student, hearing about people slightly older than you has benefits to hearing about someone who graduated 10 years ago. I recommend interviewing, taking pictures of and creating profiles of recent grads and coop students for the website and brouchure. These don't have to be for exceptional students, average CS students have really cool jobs (I'm judging from what I see from my friends and people I know in my CS classes) that high school students would get really excited about. We can show the breadth of jobs avaliable, from startups to big companies, but mentioning that CS coops get to be project managers for Microsoft and software engineers at Google doesn't hurt (and is realistic).

Well, those are my suggestions, I appreciate your time.

Andrew Lo

-- AndrewLo - 05 Dec 2005