The Foundation’s Centre for Human Capital Policy recently traveled to Vancouver to conduct a focus group with alumni from SHAD, a national youth education organization.
SHAD’s mandate aligns nicely with the Human Capital centre’s goal of promoting policies that support the development of a highly skilled and productive workforce.
We wanted to learn more about what SHAD is doing and to gain insight for a project on youth entrepreneurship and innovation. We also wanted to hear firsthand why so many people think SHAD was an indispensable part of their education.
In this post we share some of those findings and how they relate to our work.
What is SHAD?
SHAD is hard to define. Its mandate is summarized on its website this way:
SHAD is a registered Canadian charity that empowers exceptional high school students – at a pivotal point in their education – to recognize their own capabilities and envision their extraordinary potential as tomorrow’s leaders and change makers. Each year, SHAD provides the opportunity for 600+ students from across Canada and internationally to attend a month-long summer program, in residence at one of our Canadian host universities, focused on STEM (science, technology, engineering, & math).
This month-long immersion program is hosted in cohorts of around 50 students each at universities around the country. Students are surrounded by highly motivated peers and given a packed schedule of seminars, lectures, workshops, projects, social events and trips. The program is focused on STEM but also on business and entrepreneurship. Students form teams that are given a social theme – such as childhood obesity – and develop an idea, prototype and business plan for a company that could help to address the problem.
To listen to its participants, however, is to hear about something much bigger. A week or two into the program, magic happens. A month of being far from family and social media but constantly engaged and interacting with talented peers from across the country makes the program much more than just Nerd Camp.
SHAD’s unique social environment drew effusive praise from alumni in our focus group. The program aims to empower young people and inspire them to learn how to change the world. They are lofty goals, but many participants believe it works.
Why high school students come to SHAD
Although 600 students participate each year, SHAD has an element of exclusivity. Only one-third of the applicants are accepted. SHAD looks for high-potential students at risk of being stifled by the lack of opportunities. A bursary program supports students whose cannot afford the $4,500 program fee.
Most participants didn’t have anything specific they wanted to get from SHAD. They liked the idea of a Nerd Camp and jumped at the chance to spend a month learning about math and science (very few students knew about the business and entrepreneurship aspect before attending).
For most, applying for SHAD was a leap of faith. Teachers and SHAD alumni provided encouragement and support, but details were sparse as most participants explained SHAD simply as impossible to describe. SHAD alumni-to-be wanted to do something new and nerdy, but didn’t know exactly what that would mean.
What SHAD does for high-school students
SHAD helps students push boundaries, develop competencies, and widen their perspective on potential opportunities and careers. The structured activities of SHAD—lectures, workshops, business case development—expose students to a wide array of material, and help them to see cross-disciplinary connections. These activities give students the chance to become confident in their ability to master new concepts and skills, as well as the chance to fail without being judged harshly.
Besides the activities themselves, the way the program ran was also crucial. Many participants pointed to informal long, meaningful discussions as a crucial aspect of SHAD that they never got at high school. And students were forced to figure out how to collaborate as a team. Team members had to find their niche and learn to work as a whole.
SHAD alumni feel they make better decisions about which careers and opportunities to pursue, as a result of their experience. SHAD’s breadth of exposure helps to break down the barriers between fields, opening up views of innovation, so that, for example, a passion for health care could mean medical innovation and not just medical school.
“I didn’t know creating and making things could be a career,” said one participant. Another realized that he wasn’t a good engineer, but that he was really good at managing engineers.
For alumni, SHAD combated the demonization of business by presenting business as a tool to make great ideas reality. Hearing from real people in industry, learning about the triple bottom line and through the business project helped participants see business as a means to make positive change. After SHAD, participants felt more comfortable doing new, unusual, interdisciplinary things: the type of things Canada needs for the knowledge economy to be successful.
How this is useful
The Canada West Foundation is developing a report on youth entrepreneurship and innovation. We have been convinced of the central and understudied role of entrepreneurship education has high value. It prepares youth for entrepreneurial careers that draw on creativity and new idea generation.
SHAD alumni are often exemplars of the type of workforce we want; SHAD encompasses many of the education practices and values we wish more students had. We wanted to know if the program worked for our focus group participants, and to know why.
There is an obvious self-selection bias among SHAD attendees and among our participants. But we heard over and over that people were profoundly affected by the SHAD experience, and that their decisions to do innovative work or study drew heavily on what they learned during the program. These anecdotes support academic evidence that entrepreneurship education, broadly defined, opens young minds to new ideas and opportunities.
In high schools, universities, and beyond, youth’s potential is wasted without opportunities to experiment and innovate. Creating those opportunities is the key to a 21st century workforce.
– Liam St. Louis is a research intern at the Canada West Foundation