PLANTING THE SEED

ASEE Prism, Sep 2005 by Home-Douglas, Pierre

eBays first president, Jeffrey Skoll, helps University of Toronto students build stronger engineering careers-with business.

At his convocation address at the University of Toronto (UT) in 2003, Jeffrey Skoll, eBay's first president and Canada's fifth-richest billionaire, enjoined the graduating engineers to "give back to your community, give back to your school, give back to the world and you will be repaid many times over." Sage advice-and something that the 34-year-old UT electrical engineering graduate not only preaches but practices as well. The Jeffrey Skoll Foundation he founded in 1999 has financed everything from an organization that enables native artisans to sell their products online to programs that help educate girls in poor, rural communities in Africa. One of his most far-reaching gifts - at least for his fellow engineers - may turn out to be his decision in 2000 to spend $7.5 million to endow three chairs at his alma mater and establish the Jeffrey Skoll BaSc/MBA Program. The six-year, eight-month joint degree, the first of its kind in Canada, brings together what are arguably the country's top engineering and business schools into one program and provides a fast track for the budding engineering entrepreneurs and technologically astute business leaders of the future. The first graduating class in 2003 numbered just three students; 17 students are scheduled to graduate in the spring of 2006, a number Skoll officials would like to see grow to what they consider an optimal number-25 -in the next few years.

Students normally enter the program following their third year of engineering and a 16-month internship in a business or not-for-profit organization, a so-called Professional Experience Year. In the fall semester of their fourth year, students complete a condensed program of the final year of their undergraduate engineering degree. In January, the Skoll Program then places them in an eight-month management internship. Most of the companies that have been involved so far have tended to be large corporations. In the spring of 2005, the companies that signed on to have Skoll students work for them included MD Robotics, Petrocan, and the Canadian Space Agency. Susan Ludwig, manager of the Management Experience Year (MEY), says one of her goals is to develop more links with small- and medium-sized companies and financial institutions, which tend to be conservative and less flexible than engineering-related companies. "It takes an innovative company with an open-minded approach to get involved," Ludwig explains, "but once they've experienced our students, they love them." Several students also went abroad for their MEY, to countries including Taiwan, China, and Malaysia. "Asian countries seem to value our education system pretty highly," Ludwig says.

Combined with the 16-month Professional Experience Year already completed in their undergraduate years, the MEY gives students the minimum two years of work experience that UT's Rotman School of Business demands from MBA applicants. In their final two years, students complete the MBA part of their program, while finishing off any courses necessary to complete the requirements for the Canadian Engineering Accreditation Board (CEAB). The final semester includes a capstone course-"The Technology/Management Interface," designed by Peter Hughes, the original director of the Skoll Program - to highlight the overlap between engineering and business. Some of the topics covered in the course include creativity and brainstorming, concept development, and the aesthetics of design.

The location of the program, in downtown Toronto, offers advantages unmatchable at any other university in the country. "We're in the heart of the largest city in Canada, which is also to a large extent the economic driver of the country," says Steve Martin, current director of the Skoll Program. "Bay Street (home to many of the head offices of Canada's top corporations) is literally down the street. UT's faculty of engineering is the largest in Canada, the most highly rated, and offers some of the most diverse programs available. The Rotman School of Management is highly ranked and internationally recognized. Taken individually, each of these would recommend the program; taken together, they offer an unbeatable combination."

The majority of Skoll applicants come from electrical, computer, and engineering science, but eight of UT's nine engineering programs have so far been been represented. Somehow that seems fitting, considering the fact that Jeffrey Skoll himself saw his work on developing eBay as an amalgam of various engineering disciplines. As he recalled with a humorous twist at his convocation address, "A true engineering challenge: How do you get millions of people together to trade in one place? (civil engineering); how will they physically transfer their goods? (mechanical engineering); how do you leverage the Internet? (computer and electrical engineering). Finally, how do you do all this while working 100-plus-hour weeks wired on coffee and Mountain Dew? That would be chemical engineering."