2007 graduate Patrick Smith talks about what has made his work meaningful across different industries, in companies large and small, and in roles from software developer to VP of Engineering.
[1:01] Research in Motion (RIM; later Blackberry)
[4:40] Flipp (a consumer app).
[8:41] Xero (FinTech)
[13:54] ChargeLab (electric vehicles)
[15:58] Relay (a neobank)
[23:20] On the identity crisis of leaders in tech
[25:19] The role of recruiters and advice on LinkedIn (and resumes)
[31:39] The role of referrals
[32:26] The length and impact of internships, and how they may correlate
[35:29] Mario and Diane wrap up
Mario: Hello listeners. And welcome to our second episode where we chronicle a CS professional’s career. Today, we are speaking with Patrick Smith, a University of Toronto alum with over 15 years of experience in industry.
Diane: We hope you find our conversation as interesting as we did! Let’s get right into it.
Transition from undergrad to Research in Motion (RIM)
Diane: Patrick graduated from the University of Toronto in 2007, and his degree included a 16-month internship at RedHat. He chose to take his first job post-graduation at Research in Motion (or RIM), which was in its heyday at the time. We asked Patrick to reflect on his transition from school into the workforce.
Mario: Can you talk a little bit about what that initial adjustment was, how much you remember from that, that initial adjustment from I was an undergrad. Now I'm a software developer.
Patrick: Yeah absolutely. I did also have an offer at the time to return to Red Hat full time and I decided at the time. Like the offers were roughly equivalent. I decided you know what I'm going to I'm going to go join RIM. It was still going gangbusters. It was quarter after quarter really like record profit record everything. So I said, OK, I'm going to go, I'm going to go give that a try.
And I think then coming out of university, I still had- mean I had a lot of confidence about my technical ability, still, at the time. I was like, all right, let's go. What can I do in Week 1? And, so, week 1 I wanted to fix a bug. I went through getting onboarded.
It was all pretty easy at- I mean easy in the sense of like onboarding was really clear. It was like a few days of going through some documents that were very, very clear of what we needed to do to set up our environment. So, it made things, like, pretty simple to get up and running. And then I was just really excited to start developing.
And I always look back at that time of like… Agile was not a thing.
Like being a junior developer right out of school. Other people, more senior people definitely were in more meetings, design meetings and stuff like that. For me it was “Here's the work, go!” And so, it was a white board at my desk that pretty much, I don't know 12, 14 months worth of work and just bullet point and off I went.
Transition from Software Developer to Team Lead (RIM)
Diane: After 3 years as a software developer, Patrick was promoted within RIM to team lead. He told us what lead to the promotion.
Patrick: in university, I knew that I wanted to go down the leadership route. And in like, my first week, it's this junior developer fresh out of school. I said to my boss, “That's the path I want to go on. If there's opportunities that you can find for me to get experience with it, I would really appreciate it.”
And that was a continued conversation that we have and it's something I encourage all developers to do.
Mario: Yeah, so you came in in your first week, you told your manager. I'm looking at leadership. If you see opportunities, please send them my way. Were any opportunities sent your way?
Patrick: Yes… And so I was given the opportunity to lead some initiatives that, in some cases, they were ones that I was kind of raising the flag up and saying, “Hey, I think this is a gap. I think we need to cover this.”
And I was given the opportunity to be able to lead some of those. So, one of them was getting code reviews in place across the business unit we were in, and the other one was about automated testing. So, getting some automated, any automated testing into the product.
Diane: It's interesting to me that it's a different kind of leadership than many people might think they want to think I'm going to be promoted to manager, and this is different. You took on the responsibility for introducing something new into the group.
Patrick: Yeah, I think. I mean, those are often the opportunities that I initially look for, for a developer, it's lead a project lead something. Can you lead and you find out… Are you good at it? And do you like it? Or some permutation of those?
Diane: And through that the other opportunities will come.
Patrick: Exactly because I’ve also worked with some people who get that opportunity and they don't like it. The hope is that you like it and you're good at it. Or you like it and there's areas to grow. But also, if you learn that you don't like it, that's also good because then really helps shape your path.
Mario: Patrick was at RIM for nine years. Over that time, RIM became less of a force in the mobile market, and layoffs soon followed. The company also underwent a re-branding, changing its name to Blackberry. We asked Patrick how that factored into his decision to leave for a new company, Flipp, in 2016.
Patrick: Yeah. I mean, one of the things that I always look at of why do I join a company or why do I stay at a company. And two of those big things are the people. And like, is the work meaningful? Does it matter? Do people care about it?
And the answer that I gave to a lot of people during my nine years at BlackBerry, when they’d say during… you know, I was there during some of the best times and then through some of the not so good times. And people would say, “Why are you still there?” And you'll be like, “Love the people. Love the work. It's still challenging,” all of those sorts of things.
Things were definitely changing in terms of continued layoffs at BlackBerry. And nine years at the beginning of your career is an incredibly long time to stay at a company. And I did not realize… like I grew a ton of at BlackBerry. I learned a ton. I was given amazing opportunity.
I didn't realize until I had left and I joined Flipp like joining a much smaller company that was still a startup. The lack of technical breadth that I was I had in terms of my time as a developer. At the larger companies there's like specialist for everything, which is kind of amazing. But as a junior developer I wish that I had known what I was missing.
Diane: Working at a large company typically means you focus on a specific area of development. For Patrick, that was the business logic, which meant he wasn’t as involved in other parts of the software development process handled by other teams.
Mario: Flipp is a consumer app that does digital flyer distribution. In 2016, Flipp was still a startup. When Patrick joined, it was not as a developer, but as Director of Engineering. We asked Patrick about his adjustment to a startup, and how his very focused work at RIM impacted him in a leadership role where a wider scope of work was his responsibility.
Patrick: And then when I joined a startup, I was like, oh wow. There's a whole other world here, and that then comes to changing jobs, like being at a company for nine years in this effectively the same domain. I knew the domain very well.
Going then to Flipp, I no longer knew the domain the way I did. I didn't know the tech stack. I didn't know a lot of that stuff. And… You know, I think I kind of fooled myself at the beginning of thinking, OK, you know, even as a director of an engineering no, I'm going to be able to get my hands in there and I'll figure this stuff out.
And it was a bit foolish because that’s not what I was there to do. And so it was that that was a learning as well as I was making my first major job transition in my career of no, I need to kind of recenter this and it's a different type of work and.
You know, I was leading the mobile team and I'd never worked on Native mobile. But it didn't matter because that's not what the team. They had very strong technical leaders within the team. And so it's about realizing where those strengths and weaknesses are. Now, if there was a weakness there, that's not one that I would have been able to fill, quite frankly. And so it would have been something that we have gone to market with. But the team was fantastic.
Mario: What does a director of Engineering do then?
Patrick: So, a lot of it is around delivery, organizational structure, the process of how we're building things. I did a lot of work in my first year actually on engineering branding as we were building the company.
So, partnering really closely with our talent team to build an amazing engineering brand in Toronto. Did a lot of partnering with the University of Toronto in that time specifically to build our student presence as well.
So, I sort of look at like as a director of engineering, you do what's needed. You fill the holes. If there were areas technically that I could lean in on, then I would. But…
I always use mobile as a really strong example here because I've never written native iOS or Android. Very, very talented teams were in place. The last thing they needed was a director to come in and be like, “Write it this way.”
Diane: Patrick was with Flipp for a little over 2 and a half years. In 2018, he joined Hubdoc, a company that does document automation for small businesses and their accountants.
Mario: We asked Patrick what prompted the change and he said he was contacted by a recruiter who he already knew and trusted.
Patrick: He had also been working with the leaders at HubDoc since the late 90s, early 2000s and he said, “Ok, this is the team for you. Like these are the people you want to go work with.”
And I put a lot of faith in what he was saying based off of everything I knew about him. Well, then we'll get to my move to Relay 'cause he's in there, too. And, so, there was very much that connection there. Ands so, I didn't know anybody already there, but that that connection that I had with that recruiter was really meaningful and moving in.
Diane : While Patrick was transitioning to Hubdoc, it was acquired by a larger company in the financial technology space called Xero. So, Patrick joined Xero, and his role was Director of Software Development. We asked Patrick to shed some light on the transition.
Mario: At some point you went from Director of Engineering at Flipp to Director of Software Development at Xero, which I assume are maybe the same thing.
Patrick: Same thing, same thing.
Mario: Ok, same thing. Why the transition from Flipp to Xero?
Patrick: At that time I was really… I was at Flipp for about 2 1/2 years and I was seeing like, OK.
It's similar to BlackBerry. Learned a lot. Loved the people. Really great, interesting challenge. I felt like it was time for a change. And I was talking to a few places at the time, and I was actually speaking to a company called Hubdoc. And Hubdoc was acquired the week before my start date by Xero.
So, technically, I was always there from Xero, but I was originally joining a Toronto startup with about 100 people at the time called Hubdoc. The leaders within Hubdoc were really, really appealing to me. I had met with their VP of Engineering and after that interview was like I got to work with him.
Met with the co-founder and co-CEO. I want to work there. Met with the CEO, I want to work there. So I was really, really drawn to the people. And the mission of enabling small businesses was also really interesting. Small businesses really build communities. Not a lot of places really focus on building things specifically for them to make their lives easier.
And when I come back to the thing that I mentioned at the earlier of what draws me to a company, why do I stay: the people, impactful work. Hubdoc was like- had that in spades. I was very, very excited to join.
Diane: After 3 years as Director of Software Development, Patrick was promoted to VP of Engineering. How does a VP differ from a director? Patrick told us about it.
Mario: What is the difference between VP of Engineering, Director of Software Development? How does your role change all of a sudden?
Patrick: Yeah, I mean, it was a pretty big change. Particularly in a company like Xero, which is a global company headquartered in New Zealand. So, we're about 5000 people.
And the, like the VP of Engineering that was at Hubdoc, that was a big draw for me to join Hubdoc. He was retiring. And so, I was moving into his role.
I would say at first I was initially like, “Oh, I'm- yeah this will be fine.”
And then, oh, my God, was I overwhelmed, like, oh, my God, was I overwhelmed when I first went into that role. I mounted like, a white board to my office in my basement just to try and keep track of things.
And one of the things that my- Like the person was previously in the role. My predecessor. He said, “It's very lonely here. Because we're the only,” He was the only technology leader on the continent. And so, then I was taking that up.
And in a global 5000-person company, where it it's effectively running 24/7, the thing that really, really helped me was… there were total of seven of us globally leading all of product engineering across about 1300 developers and I always thought, “They are altogether. They're like, you know, they have each other. They know what's going on. They have it together.”
And once a month we would come together. And one of them called it group therapy. And that meeting that once a month-- it didn't matter if I was on vacation—I did not miss that meeting. I valued it so much, getting an opportunity to just talk with my peers very openly.
I love that group. I absolutely love them. And I miss them terribly and I'm very sad I never got to meet any of them in person yet. It was during the era of COVID and they're on the other side of the world. That was absolutely tremendous for my sanity in terms of understanding, like, OK, we're all in this together. We'll make sense of it. Yes, there's a lot.
And then and then it settled down. It was like a big spike at first of oh, Oh my God, there's a lot going on. And then it settled. You get into a groove.
Mario: After serving as a VP of Engineering in Xero from 2021 to 2023, Patrick went on to join a much smaller company, ChargeLab. ChargeLab worked on electric-vehicle charging, implementing the server-side of open protocols so that other companies running commercial charger sites could manage, maintain, and monetize their own chargers. We asked Patrick what prompted the change.
Patrick: … one of the things that I was looking for in leaving a 5000-person company and going to a sub-100-person company was the ability to more rapidly effect change. That was one of things I was looking for. I wanted to go back to a really small company where we could just move faster.
Diane: While at Xero, Patrick had climbed the ranks to become one of their VPs of Engineering. But, at ChargeLab, Patrick joined as the only VP of Engineering. We asked Patrick what it was like to move with the same role from one company to another.
Mario: … you mentioned the initial adjustment from Software Director of Software development to VP of Engineering was overwhelming. What was the adjustment like between VP of Engineering at one company to VP of Engineering now at ChargeLab?
Patrick: Yeah, not overwhelming. So, I understood- You know, I think I had a much better understanding of what to do. The difference there being- Did not have any existing relationships with the people within the company.
Whereas through Xero and growing- spending five years there, like you build a lot of relationships. Then it's like OK. How do we build relationships? Where a lot of it was remote relationships are a huge component of it. I was going into the office multiple days a week.
There it was really about stuff that I've actually done over the years anyway but evaluate where we are organizationally evaluate where we are structurally, how we're working, and then iteratively make changes.
So, it was not overwhelming. Another place where people were fantastic, loved the people there. Really great mission and impact that was possible.
Mario: And then there was a transition then from VP of Engineering at ChargeLab to VP of Engineering at Relay. You mentioned earlier that had something to do with a recruiter that you know of.
Patrick: Yes, so the same recruiter who got me into Hubdoc / Xero. He messaged me in the Spring and he said, “Let's go for lunch. Please tell me that you're miserable and want to leave.”
And I said, “I'm not miserable. I don't want to leave, but because it's you like, let's go for lunch.” And- We had lunch and he said, “It's Relay,” and my response was kind of like uh, crap. OK, we got to do this.
Diane: We asked Patrick why and, as you listen to his response, we hope you see the importance of networking not only with recruiters, but also with the people that you’ve loved to work with in the past.
Patrick: So, when I had left Flipp in the summer of 2018, I was staying in contact with a member of the team there who I really loved working with. And a couple weeks into me joining Hubdoc, he had told me he was actually about to start a company with somebody who had just left Hubdoc, which was the head of marketing.
And so, within that first month of leaving Flipp, this person at Flipp who I really, really loved working with was starting up a company called Relay. And I did a reference call for him with between the two cofounders, and since then, going back to 2018, we would chat every now and then about when, when are we going to work together again? And so I've been watching Relay from the sidelines since before it formed.
People that I know, like the co-founder of Hubdoc and I, would meet every now and then. And he's like the world's biggest cheerleader of Relay. Every time I ask him, hey, who in the city is hiring for this role? I'm trying to find somebody a role. His response is, “Relay. Relay is the only company in Toronto really growing or doing something.”
And so. I'd been watching it for six years. And when he said it was Relay I was like, OK, I’m going to have to do this. And my wife said to me, you don't really want to leave ChargeLab, do you?
And my answer was no. But, if I don't join Paul and this team at relay and go for this, I'm going to regret it for the rest of my life.
Mario: We know that the impact of a company is very important to Patrick. Let’s learn more about why Relay was attractive beyond just the people there.
Diane: What does relay do?
Patrick: So, Relay is bringing back to the Hubdoc and fintech space in terms of small and medium businesses. Relay is a neobank. We're we're digital bank specifically targeted at small and medium businesses.
I've had an opportunity to work with a variety of banks over the years. Banks really are not really putting in the effort for small and medium businesses. And small and medium businesses are what run and build communities.
And there is an opportunity that that the Founders recognized if we could build a bank specifically for small and medium businesses, that suited their needs, made their lives easier that it would be really impactful on their lives.
And I saw that at hubdoc and Xero in terms of the impact we can have on their lives. And now I see it at Relay. Making their lives easier is just a tremendous impact to be a part of.
Mario: So, is Relay a bank or is it a technology company?
Patrick: So, we're a fintech company. And so, we are what's called a neobank. So, we are not the actual bank. We partner with a sponsor bank where the money actually is. And we're a layer over top of that which provides all of the services that really help support small medium businesses.
Diane: I really like how, throughout all of these companies, you found something that's really meaningful to you. Where you can have an impact. You talked about that at the beginning of our interview and I really see it.
Patrick: The impact is it is such a big draw for me. Do people care about the work that we're doing? You'll often hear about-
particularly a long time ago when we were not, when most companies were not in the cloud. Like you could do an internship and your work will never see prod- won't see the light of day for maybe years because of what the development cycle is like. Depending on the company and a bunch of other things.
But seeing the impact of your work and people caring about it is incredibly rewarding. I don't know many people who want to work on things people don't care about. And it really finding companies that has a mission that resonates with you makes your day-to-day your life just that much better of the impact that you're.
And what I often say to students who are not sure what they want to do the, the, the classic is, “Do I want to go to Silicon Valley or do I want to stay here? Do I want to do a startup? Do I want to do a big company?”
And I always say you need to really kind of do some searching into yourself of what you care about. Do you care about the name of the company for your resume? Do you care about the impact that they're having? Do you care about the pay? Do you care about the people? Do you care about the culture? (And that culture means different things to you and different people.)
You need to 1st understand what it is that you value and care about, and then you go out and get that. And that can be tough soul searching if you really just don't know. You really need to maybe meet with somebody to ask you some questions about what you really care about, to help unravel that for you.
Mario: Patrick has had quite a journey in industry. And with all that experience, he had a lot of advice for our students.
Diane: Yes, let’s get to the advice, which by the way, is particularly relevant to new grads looking for their first job and undergrads looking for their first internship.
Mario: And a quick word on terminology: In our department we have something called the Arts and Science Internship Program, or ASIP for short. But in the past, we had a similar program called the Professional Experience Year, or PEY. Both programs involve a long-form internship, and Patrick loves to hire people who’ve done one of these.
We did bring this up the new name, ASIP, with Patrick, but he was set in his ways. :-)
Mario: And just for our listeners, especially new listeners or new students to the University of Toronto, you mentioned PEY, which has been used traditionally as our professional experience here. That’s What it stands for. But currently we have something called the Arts and Science Internship Program. Is that also part of your PEY efforts?
Patrick: Yes, I will forever call it PEY. I did a PEY. It's ingrained in me. Even when we look at other schools, I still call it PEY. Other schools that do like 16-month terms.
Mario: So, if you hear Patrick say PEY, it’s analogous to a long internship with a company, which current students can do with the ASIP program.
Diane: Great, now that that’s cleared up, let’s jump in to Patrick’s advice!
Mario: Patrick’s journey took him from software developer into leadership. As you can imagine, leaders don’t have as much time to get their hands dirty and write code. Patrick talked about what this shift felt like for him.
Diane: Speaking of this coding business. At some point, did you stop having the opportunity to do coding in your job? When did that happen? And how do you feel about it? Because you love coding so much.
Patrick: Very good question.
I regularly talk about that with new leaders as well. When I was first promoted at BlackBerry… Day one I was sort of like, “OK, I’m ready to do this leadership stuff.” And then like kind of nothing happens. You're still sort of doing the same thing. And especially when it’s an area where you know it so well, technically you built large components of it.
Your hands are still dirty. That really changed gradually very, very gradually because it was being promoted in an area that I already knew very well technically. So I was still very hands on. And then before I knew it, it was like, oh, I'm really completely hands off now. This is weird.
And that was not a good feeling. Like I see it with every new leader that I promote, and I call it the identity crisis of a new leader because you were valued for that technical ability for the- for the coding that you were doing, and then now you doing it.
But it was like--kind of boiling the ocean thing--of like, “Oh wow, now I'm doing it.”
And, so, I had these identity crises, primarily in the middle of the night. And, so, what I ended up doing was like… we had changed stack completely. So, I still knew the domain, but I did not know how to do it.
And, so, what I ended up doing was I just started fixing bugs at night. I put a hockey game on. I’d sit on the sofa and I just fixed bugs all night. Just to reconnect, to reconnect to… Have some confidence in what I was actually saying.
Diane: Is that something you recommend others do?
Patrick: It depends on the person. It depends what they're struggling. So sometimes if people are really struggling with exactly what I was struggling with and they're a new leader, I say like fix some bugs, but don't be on the critical path. If you’re on the critical path that's immediately at risk.
Diane: Some of our students approach their job search by diligently applying to posted jobs. In the current market, they might apply to hundreds of jobs without getting an interview. We ask Patrick about two elements of the search that are really important: Recruiters and LinkedIn.
Mario: Can you talk about like, what is a recruiter? What is their role? And how maybe has it changed from when we had this hot economy, a hot job market to maybe what it is today?
Patrick: Oh yeah. I mean, there's some recruiters that I've worked with that I've worked now with at three companies with. A good recruiter is incredible. Just incredible to build a team with.
So, you know, when I was at BlackBerry during the height of BlackBerry's success. It was a lot of inbound, so a lot of applicants. The industry over time, really becomes, like, outreach.
So, recruiters reaching out to candidates to convince them to engage in a process. Even with the industry where it is right now, where things have definitely changed. We're still seeing that a lot of hires are made through recruiters reaching out to people in market.
And, so. what does a recruiter do? Back to your first question. One: like the first big thing would be sourcing.
So sourcing is leveraging tools like LinkedIn Recruiter to be able to find people that fit, like an ideal profile that were looking for. So they're going out and they're searching everything… and LinkedIn has quite powerful tools for this that you may or may not see as a as just a (or you definitely don't see as just a LinkedIn user) but they're using LinkedIn tools or other tools to find candidates that we believe would be a good match.
They're crafting outreach messages. They're generally really data-driven and tracking their response rates, doing experiments to figure out what resonates and what doesn't. I've run a lot of experiments over the years with my recruitment team and I'm like a really fantastic recruiter is a partner. Like those are my favourite recruiters.
Diane: So your LinkedIn presence can have a pretty big impact on whether you get contacted by a recruiter. But what if you’re not an experienced CS professional? What do new grads need to put on their LinkedIn to make sure they’re picked up when a recruiter is searching for good candidates?
Patrick: Whenever I talk about resumes on LinkedIn, I always have put a big caveat here of this is what resonates with me and generally the companies that I've been at. There are companies where this advice I would give would be terrible advice. But really, I mean, I can't imagine that this would be bad advice but:
Focus on the impact of what you've done. Don't fill it with acronyms that nobody but people in that company understand what that means. Always ask yourself on every line of that resume, “So what?”
What is the, “so what,” for that thing? And if you are a PEY before you leave, you still have access to the data of the impact that you've made. Get that data. And get those statistics of the, “so what,” of what you've done.
And always ask that question. If you say that you lead something. If you said that you drove something, So what? What was the result of it? Focus on the result.
Mario: Could we maybe talk a little bit more about co-curricular experience. So, for example, a number of our students are doing really cool things with certain clubs. Like UT Mist, Blueprint, so on and so forth.
Do those factor into the PEY profiles that you're looking at? Do they factor into the new grad profiles that you're looking at?
Patrick: Yes, it is still a data point. And it depends on what signal we can get from that experience and it depends on what the role is looking for.
There are definitely going to be students going into PEY where they they've not had an opportunity to do those things. And so, then the only data point is grades, the more data points that you can have, the better.
So, if you're joining those clubs and there's an interesting signal, it's a- then it's a valuable data point.
Mario: So, is an interesting signal the role that you had in the club? Or is it, sort of going back to your, “so whats,” something that they can say that that role led to?
Patrick: It’s likely both. So, it could be the role. There could be signals that we look for there in terms of like cultural values that are specific to a company that you can then infer from what they've done.
As an example, when we were- when I was at Hubdoc when we were hiring 4-month co-ops for a team, we really needed people with a lot of resilience. We- they really needed to be resilient to work on that team and four months was pretty much like an upper limit of being on that team because of the- the type of work was really tough.
People with retail experience was a signal that we were like, you have to be resilient to be in retail.
Mario: Retail being like working at Best Buy.
Patrick: Yes. Working at a restaurant or- like you need resilience to do that.
Mario: Yeah, working at a restaurant is definitely. Ok, so that's what you mean by resilience. Is that the ability to, I guess handle lots of stress?
Patrick: And also, we would also see things like, people would have on their resume, things like… A top level piano. I don't remember what they're called.
Diane: Right.
Patrick: Man do you need to be resilient to get to that. And so those were signals that we actually looked for in the absence of other signals.
Diane: Is a company saying you need to be really resilient sometimes code for… it’s going to be… There's a word I don't to use on our podcast… it’s going to be rough there?
Patrick: That was very specific type of work that one of like an amazing developer he worked on- He worked on some work for like a month and literally got nowhere. And it's not because of his competency.
Diane: Oh ok, that's a different kind of resilience, yeah.
Patrick: Yes, you need to be resilient because you might work on something for a long time and just not get anywhere, and it has nothing to do with you. It's not like you're failing. It's that, with what, the tools that are at disposal might not be solvable right now. And you need to be resilient through that and not- not take that personally and not feel like, oh, this really sucks or something like that. They needed to be resilient.
Mario: We heard in our last episode with Lauren Mason that your network can refer you for certain jobs. So, it should come as no surprise that Patrick is also a huge proponent of referrals and the networking effect.
Patrick: Or through people's networks like referrals are- referrals mean everything. In January, at relay, we will be doing a referral open house, which is something we first did at Flipp. Bring in your friends. Bring your friends in, see the space and learn about the business. Every company have been at like, there's a reason why referral bonuses are a thing like.
…sometimes it can be very lucrative. But it it's because of that networking effect. It really comes down to the networking effect of you're bringing people from your network and your vouching for them, and they tend to have a better success rate.
Diane: Patrick’s career choices were driven by his passion for making an impact. But what kind of impact can an intern have? Patrick talked about how longer internships make space for bigger impact.
Patrick: What I've noticed since the pandemic or since coming out of the pandemic, a lot more students are looking for 12-month. Before 16 was pretty much a given. My take on it is I’m pretty firm on 16 months.
Mario: So, you do find that there is a difference between having a 16 versus a 12-month.
Diane: Never mind a four-month short co-op term, as people often call it.
Patrick: Absolutely.
Mario: The Arts and Science Internship Program gives you quite a bit of flexibility in how you fit internships into your degree, both in terms of the number of internships you do and the length of those internships. We asked Patrick his opinion on the trade-offs.
Patrick: I think there's certain types of work that really work well with four-month. Not everything. If there's, I mean often joining a team, you're on boarding your ramp up might be four months. It might be 2, 3 months.
So, it takes months generally to get up to speed. And what I generally hear from the managers and the leaders of four month students is, “they were just hitting their stride.”
And when I look at what makes a really amazing work term, it’s impact. Both for the business, the team- Well, sorry…. for the business, the team and the student being able to make an impact.
For 16 months, there's so much opportunity for impact. You have a few months of getting on boarded. You then get a lot of mentorship opportunity, both to be a mentor and to be mentored. If your business is still doing 4-month as well. You get to train and onboard everybody who comes in, so you get really good experience there.
What I say for 16-month students what I say to the managers is treat them like a full time employee in every single way. Do not treat them any. Give them things you don't think they can. Do not treat them any differently.
Diane: Completing a long internship, whether it be 12 or 16 months, delays your graduation date. We asked Patrick whether it’s worth it.
Patrick: Deeply worth it. Deeply-
If I get two resume- let's say we- let's say I posted a junior role tomorrow and I had two resumes on my desk. One did a four-year degree with no PEY. And the other did a 16-month PEY. All things considered equal-
Like at that point the grades matter a lot less. Grades- your transcript is just a datapoint. It is- in the absence of anything else, it's a data point. If I have data points that are about your impact that you've been able to have, I do not care about your grades.
I mean, when you are a student, grades are life. They are everything. What's going to then matter is experience. The grades are a data point that help you get that experience. And then after that it's all experience.
Mario: Thank you so much for coming in today.
Patrick: You're very welcome. It's been really great having a chance to chat today.
Diane: Just a delight, thank you.