Find talent in your alma mater: Why and how to hire Concordia Co-op students

Alumna Co-op program as well as a former Program Coordinator, Sara Baptiste-Brown now oversees the professional development and internship hiring process for approximately 4,000 students across all faculties at Concordia.

In addition to being the home of Concordia's flagship 3-internship Co-op program, the Institute has several offerings such as the mentorship-augmented internship program Women in Engineering – Career Launch Experience (WIE-CLE), Accelerated Career Experience (ACE) which offers a one-time intensive 12-16 month internship, Graduate Co-op for Masters students, as well as the flexible four-month internship program for undergraduates, C.Edge.

Josie Scalia is a veritable ambassador for the Concordia Co-op program. She has worked extensively with Co-op over the years and has hired many Co-op interns.

Josie has more than 20 years of experience in international taxation, mergers & acquisitions, accounting, auditing, consulting, transfer pricing, indirect tax and in managing diverse teams and multiple projects.

In the first twelve years of her career, Josie worked in the Big 4 public accounting firms. During this period, she moved to the U.S. to work and to continue her studies. After moving back to Canada, she joined Ernst and Young’s global tax team where she held the position of Senior Manager in their tax practice until 2006. After that time, Josie accepted the position of Director, Taxation where she worked for over nine years as the Head of Tax for Canada’s largest dry-bulk shipping company.

Josie is the International Treasurer for the Tax Executives Institute (TEI) and a Member of the Board of Directors for the Quebec Breast Cancer Foundation.

Kelly is eager to talk to alumni about her multiple Co-op work terms and how they helped shape her experience as a Concordia student and recent grad.

During her time at Concordia, Kelly was a member of the Science College and Co-operative Education Institute, as well as the Secretary of the 61st Garnet Key Society. Throughout her undergraduate degree, Kelly had the opportunity to work in five research and one processing laboratories, resulting in two publications and two poster presentations in addition to her Honours thesis defense.

Kelly is a PhD student at Laval University, studying Natural Product Synthesis in the laboratory of Prof. J. Boukouvalas. She graduated from Concordia in Fall 2019 with a BSc Honours Chemistry Co-Op, Minor in Multidisciplinary Studies in Science. She studied Organic Synthesis at McGill for one year with Prof. J. Gleason prior to beginning at Laval University.

Kelly has been a Teaching Assistant at both McGill and Laval Universities. She is presently writing for the Graduate Matters blog at University Affairs, shedding light on pertinent challenges faced by contemporary graduate students including: socializing during the COVID-19 pandemic, impostor syndrome, switching supervisors, and applying for the Rhodes Scholarship.

Before graduating from Concordia in 2020 with a degree in Mechanical Engineering (Co-op), Dewakar was one of the founding partners of Tesseract Technologies Inc., a startup company with a team of six Concordians that aims to use machine learning to help high-school and CEGEP students determine what post-secondary program would best suit them.

Always interested in working towards solving our energy crisis, Dewakar worked at Natural Resources Canada under their Materials & Energy technology division, mostly with using Machine Learning and AI to predict how buildings behave. He also later worked on a NATO project geared towards cutting energy usage and costs for the Canadian military.

Currently Dewakar is working as an AI Control Engineer at Brainbox AI, a company specializing in optimizing energy usage in buildings using AI.