St. Clair College Receives Cash Infusion To Conduct Applied Research

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St. Clair College has received $40,000 from the Innovation and Validation Assistance Program through the Ontario Centre of Excellence to conduct applied research projects that will give third year Computer Systems Technology Networking students the opportunity to work in actual business settings.

This mean that more than 60 third year students will be assigned to businesses in the community to complete an analysis of the company’s existing IT infrastructure.

As a result of this grant, the program is looking for companies to be part of this project. John Sanderson, Faculty member for Computer Networking, says this is a great opportunity for students to get real-world experience. “While the on-site analysis project has been in place for a few years, this year we are stepping up our activities in the hopes of providing small and medium sized businesses the chance to improve their IT infrastructure.” The grant provides some funding that may allow businesses to acquire hardware and software they need to implement the recommendations made by the students.

They say that in the past students who have been assigned to companies to analyze company IT hardware and software systems have saved companies hundreds of thousands of dollars and identified areas of weakness in computer networks that companies didn’t know existed.

The projects take place in the winter semester (January – April), and Sanderson is looking for companies who want to participate to contact him right away. “We want companies to know this service is available to them and we are eager to show them how skilled our students are at coming up with innovative solutions to complex IT issues.” New companies or individually owned startup ventures participating in the program may also be eligible to share in Microsoft’s BizSpark program offering up to 120k of bundled Cloud based software and technologies.

You can contact him at 519-972-2727 Ext. 4133.