Bouge is proud to announce that it will be offering 4 $500 scholarships to local Ottawa-area high school students in 2008 who intend to pursue a university degree. To enter, ask your guidance counsellor or email us at katherine@bouge.ca

We are launching an exciting scholarship program for graduating high school students to win $500! We are selecting four students from high schools in Ottawa to each receive a $500 scholarship. To be eligible, you are: 1 Expecting to graduate high school in Spring 2009 2. Expecting to attend university in Fall 2009 3. Interested in volunteerism and leadership Winners will become Bouge scholars and provide first hand accounts of their university experiences on our website in their first year of university. If you are interested in this exciting new opportunity, please fill out a Bouge scholarship application form, available from your guidance counsellor. You also need to join our facebook page and post a message on our facebook discussion board. To learn more, contact katherine@bouge.ca. If your high school is not participating in this program, you can also contact us and we will be in touch with your guidance office to make sure you get an application.

Bouge has started a facebook page. Join the group and post a message on the discussion thread to chat with fellow students about university matters. By doing this and filling out a scholarship application form (available from your guidance counsellor), you will be eligible for a $500 scholarship.

Click here to our Facebook page!

The Globe and Mail recently reported that the most popular university programs in Ontario this year include environmental studies, math and engineering. Applications to the University of Waterloo's faculty of environmental studies alone went up 62% from last year.

Which programs are on the decline? Education, music, forestry and physical and health education.

See below for a few of the environmental programs at Canadian universities.

Link to University of Waterloo

Link to University of Guelph

Link to McGill University

Bouge receives another round of grant funding from the Community Foundation of Ottawa. The funds will be used to plan Bouge's outreach for the next school year.

Canadian law schools have always prided themselves on providing a comparable education to American law schools. It would seem however that law firms in the US beg to differ.

Apparently, American law firms are sometimes paying substantially more in salary for graduates of US law schools then Canadian ones. The reason? Believe it or not, it may have something to do with the name of the degree!

You see, in Canada, law grads earn the LLB degree (BCL for those studying Quebec's civil law). In the US, law grads earn a JD, or Juris Doctor. The reason for this difference stems from the fact that you need an undergrad degree to go to law school in the US, but that's not necessarily the case in Canada. So some American firms pay more for the JD than the LLB.

The University of Toronto's law school switched over to the JD designation a few years ago to be better recognized internationally, and now a few other Canadian law schools are considering doing the same.

Click here to learn more about the debate

The Globe and Mail returns with its annual survey of universities across the country. Unlike other surveys, the Globe's rankings are based on university students' views on their own schools. The University of Western Ontario once again comes out on top.

Link to The Globe and Mail's 2007 university survey

Bouge would like to extend a warm welcome to all the students who are gearing up for the university application process this fall. For the 2007/08 academic year, we have updated our site to better help you find what you are looking for.

So take a few minutes and browse through our blog entries and list of mentors. If you have a question about schools or careers, feel free to post a message to one of our volunteer mentors. Our young professionals will be happy to answer any questions you might have!

With the environment becoming one of the top issues for Canadians, many students are wondering how they can make a career out of envronmentalism. Fortunately, the opportunities are now greater than ever before.

If you're interested in campaigning for change and raising awareness for causes, then joining an environmental non-governmental organization is your best bet. These would include Greenpeace, the David Suzuki Foundation, and the Sierra Club.

If you are more interested in working within government to effect change by providing advice to Ministers of the Environment, look to Environment Canada and the provincial ministries of the environment.

Finally, there are some interesting green private sector options. Lots of companies are cropping up to help build solar panels, sell wind energy, and develop renewable fuels.

The best place to find these jobs? Try British Columbia, and Vancouver in particular, which has attracted a sizable grouping of environmental organizations. It is also home to the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia, which has just launched an MBA program on sustainability.

Link to Sierra Club of Canada

Link to David Suzuki Foundation

Link to Environment Canada

Link to UBC sustainability MBA program

When people think of Ottawa, they think of government and high-tech, but not necessarily of a big business city. That may be about to change.

Ian Telfer, who became rich through mining, has donated $25 million, the largest single gift to a business school, to the faculty of management at uOttawa to help put the school on the map.

Renamed the Telfer School of Management, the new funds will be put in an endowment to provide funding for students, faculty and other top priorities.

Link to Telfer School of Management

In the past, students hoping to work for big car companies designing the latest models would pursue studies in industrial design. Now, a crop of specialized programs in Canada will help make sure that students get the focussed educational background they need to succeed.

The 2007 Canadian International Auto Show solicited submissions from students for car designs. Of those shortlisted, two Canadian schools stand out: Humber College and l'Université de Montréal. We also hear that l'Université du Quebéc à Montréal, where the lead designer for the new Volvo C30 graduated, is pretty good too.

Link to 2007 International Auto Show Design Competition

Link to l'Université de Montréal design school

Link to Humber College design

Link to l'Université du Quebéc à Montréal design

Looking to see what the next generation of Canada's artists and designers are up to? Check out the Ontario College of Arts and Design's annual Graduate Exhibition at the school's campus on 100 McCaul Street from May 11 to May 13, 2007

Link for more information on OCAD's exhibition

According to a new report by the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, the number of people applying to universities continues to grow. This means greater competition for all sorts of programs, and university watchers are beginning to worry that admission averages will get pushed up.

Said Claire Morris, the head of the AUCC, in the Globe and Mail, "Access is more than just affordability. It's what is the capacity of the universities to receive students and provide them with a quality education."

Ryerson University alone has reported an increase of 20% in the number of applicants this year.

Link to AUCC Report

For most, the biggest adjustment in university is paying for tuition. At an average of $4,785 a year, it certainly is no small change.

A new study by the Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation, however, has shown however that tuition is but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to university costs. Room and board costs on average $3,915, and don't forget about the cost of books, transportation and entertainment.

The conclusion of the CMSF? The total annual cost of going away for school is closer to $14,500.

Does this mean that university isn't worth it? Not at all. A post-secondary education is probably the best investment you can make in your life. Sure you delay working and making cash for a few years, but the payback in a higher salary afterwards will be well worth it.

Link to Canada Millennium Scholarship Foundation report

You've heard of Doctors Without Borders and Engineers Without Borders. But Students Without Borders?

This new program, run through World University Service of Canada, offers 40 student internships in developing countries funded by the Canadian International Development Agency. They are divided into winter and summer terms, and countries range from Mali and Burkino Faso to Vietnam and Peru.

Interested? Click here

An undergraduate education in Canada is pretty good no matter where you go. Still, there are a few schools that are beter known for some subjects than others. If you are interested in business, Western and Queen's are still your best bets. Journalism? Think Carleton or Ryerson. But when it comes to computer science and engineering, the University of Waterloo is at the top of many people's lists.

Over many years, UW has developed a strong reputation in the applied sciences. So much so that Bill Gates once remarked that Microsoft only recruits from Waterloo for its programming team!

Now it looks like UW has done it again. They've managed to snag a Nobel Prize laureate, Sir Anthony J. Leggett, to join its Institute for Quantum Computing. Quite a feat, considering that only a handful of Canadian universities, such as the University of Toronto and the University of British Columbia, have been able to do so.

If you are interested in computer science and the emerging field of quantum computing, you could do worse than head to Waterloo.

Link to Waterloo's Institute for Quantum Computing

In the increasingly crowded field of business education, schools are always looking for new ways to distinguish themselves and attract the best students.

HEC Montreal is now boasting the first ever program of its kind for undergrads in North America: a trilingual Bachelor of Business Administration. This program has been extremely successful with students, with the program director noting that the inaugural intake of 20 students had to be expanded into two cohorts of 50-60 students just to meet demand.

How does the program work? The first year requires students to take a third of their courses in the languages of English, French and Spanish. In the second year, students attend a mandatory international exchange program with a foreign university. In the third year, students specialize in a particular area of business.

Interested? Click here

With the booming economy and population in Alberta, Maritime universities such a Mount Allison University, Acadia University and the University of New Brunswick are stepping up efforts to recruit western Canadians looking to study elsewhere in the country.

A recent article in the Globe and Mail reports that schools located in the Atlantic provinces are offering incentives to students out west to make the cross-country trek for post-secondary education. These carrots include coveted single rooms in student residences and draws for tuition wavers of $1,000 and free flights home.

This may raise issues of fairness and equal treatment for some. For western Canadians though, it sounds like a pretty good deal.

Acadia University

University of New Brunswick

Dalhousie University

Seeking to capitalize on the growing cluster of video game and media arts companies in British Columbia, four key BC educational institutions (UBC, SFU, the Emily Carr Institute and the BC Institute of Technology) have teamed up to offer the Masters of Digital Media Program.

The program consists of two-years of schooling in digital media, plus a summer internship at a video game/design firm. Graduates are expected to have a direct link into the budding industry in BC.

Some big firms are sponsors of the program: Blastradius, Electronic Arts, and Microsoft. The downsde? A cost of $20,000 per year (including all software and hardware). But the potential for a lucrative, dynamic, and career job may lie just around the corner.

Link to Digital Media Program

Salary numbers released by the Canadian Institute for Health Information have shed some light into this often debated question. According to the CIHI's analysis, the average family doctor nets an overall gross revenue of $202,481. Surgical specialists earn substantially more, at $334,012 per year. But these numbers don't tell the whole story. There are huge discrepancies in revenue figures across different parts of Canada. For example, while a family doctor in Quebec brings in an average of$164,568 per annum, her counterpart in Alberta does substantially better, at $232,742. The difference? The fees that the provincial governments pay to doctors for their services. So are these revenue figures really what doctors actually make in take home salary? No way. Doctors typically have to pay costs, such as administrative expenses and salaries for office staff. These costs eat away about 30% to 50% of annual revenues. Doctors also go through a whole lot of post-secondary education before they can practice, and incur a lot of debt before they start practicing and earning a salary. Which is why, in the end, students who aspire to be medical doctors should do it for the love of the profession, and for their passion in helping the sick. When you love what you do, the salary is but a nice extra thrown in.

Every year around this time, second-year law school students do a whirwind round of interviews with Ontario and BC law firms to score coveted summer jobs (Alberta, Quebec and Maritime interviews occur early in the new year.) Scoring a job through this process is important, as it is often the ticket to an articling position after graduation.

So what are the new trends emerging in this recruitment process across the country? A recent article in the Globe reports that law schools are building up their resources to help their students land these summer jobs, but not just through the traditional classroom teaching. Many are beefing up their career services departments, with some running live interview simulations with real lawyers.

Some firms are also giving students the opportunity to try international experiences by offering what is known as the "split summer," where students spend half their summer with a US firm trying their luck in places like New York and Boston, while spending the other half in Canada with a domestic firm.

Other firms are even starting recruitment a year earlier, targeting first year students for summer jobs. Professors are divided on this approach, arguing that students are having less and less time to focus on learning before being pulled into the working world. Students don't seem to mind though. They are getting more choice than ever.

Like every other profession, the world of accountants is facing a retirement crunch over the next five to ten years. Although 1,300 newly minted chartered accountants (CAs) are hired every year, that's 30 percent less than the level in the early 1990s. The shrinking of supply of CAs means fiercer competition for talent among the major accounting firms (KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young and Deloitte & Touche).

Perks these days include flexible hours and concierge services to help you make appointments and water the plants at home.

And how much does a CA make these days? A starting salary of approximately $68,000 (including bonuses) and $113,000 after five years. Certified Management Accountants make $77,000 starting, and $96,700 after five to ten years. Certified General Accountants have an average salary of $40,000 and up.

Link to Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants
Link to Society of Management Accountants of Canada
Link to Certified General Accountants Association of Canada

A new and innovative university is about to launch in British Columbia. Quest University, designed to be a small, liberal arts college, will take a radically new approach to teaching undergraduate curriculum.

Quest will be a private, non-profit university, and as such will charge a hefty sum of $24,000 per year in tuition fees, plus $11,000 in room and board. This compares to about $4,300 in annual tuition at a public university.

So what do you get for all that money? Well, for starters, the teacher to student ratio is supposed to be 10-to-1, which is unheard of at any other undergraduate institution that typically crams hundreds of students into lecture halls. Also, students will be completely immersed in courses for weeks at a time, and not take various courses at once, to ensure a comprehensive understanding of a subject matter (the emphasis throughout the four-year program will be equally on the humanities and the sciences). Finally, Quest will be small. Officials are aiming for a maximum of 650 students at any given time at the university.

Despite the cost, this sounds like a much needed innovation in post-secondary education that has a good chance of succeeding.

Link to Quest University

With the Alberta economy booming, it is getting mighty tempting to drop out of high school to pursue pretty fantastic pay working in the oil sands. There just aren't enough workers around to fill all those new jobs being created. The Globe and Mail recently reported that one in four students who start high school doesn't finish, one of the worst rates in Canada!

And it's really a short-sighted thing for students to do. Yes, the cash is really great, and you can live so much better than if you were a student, with potentially years of school left ahead of you. But we all need to think of school as an investment rather than an expense. Going to school is something that pays off in the long term, not right away.

Another Globe article reports that 3/5 of all Canadians making over $100,000 have university degrees. This can't be just a coincidence. But what if you just aren't into airy-fairy academic research? Is there a way to do university work that combines the practical aspects of a college diploma? Many colleges and universities are doing just that with special combined degree/diploma programs, including the University of Guelph/Humber College, Carleton University/Algonquin College and York University/Seneca College. Check it out!

Link to Guelph-Humber
Link to Carleton-Algonquin
Link to York-Seneca
Meet a Bouge mentor doing the Carleton-Algonquin Bachelor of Information Technology Program!

The state of women in engineering got a rare dose of good news with the appointments of Elizabeth Cannon and Cristina Amon as the deans of the engineering departments at the University of Calgary and the University of Toronto respectively.

Nonetheless, the number of female students enrolled in engineering faculties remain dismally low. According to a recent Globe and Mail article, just 20% of first-year engineering classes are women, down from 30% five years ago. This is in stark contrast with the student body at large, where women make up 60 percent of the group.

Why the discrepancy? It's hard to say, though both deans speculate that stereotypes of engineering being a "guy thing" persist. That's really a shame. Engineering students quickly discover that their training opens up a wide range of career opportunities. In addition to being professional engineers, many of them find that engineering school prepares them well for the business world (it is highly quantitative afterall) and international development work. Hardly a man's world.

Time to work on those statistics!

Students at China's Shengda Economics, Trade and Management College recently riotted through their campus in Henan province, destroying classrooms, and resisting the police. What prompted this act of rebellion? Outrage at political censorship? Concern over human rights abuses? Try school branding.

In a country where post-secondary education at an elite institution is a ticket to economic (if not political) freedom, the announcement by Shengda College that it would put its name on graduate diplomas (and not the name of the more prestigious Zhengzhou University to which it is affiliated) sparked outrage. Students and their parents had paid good money to be associated with the Zhengzhou brand, and Shengda College's act was seen as a betrayal.

Which brings up an interesting point. In the academic world, like in most other things, branding, like it or not, does count for something. An engineering degree at Waterloo, a business degree at Queen's or Western, is seen by others as a stamp of approval. Students work hard to get the grades and other prerequisites to get into these programs, and in return, they benefit from the branding of these programs. Like it or hate it, branding does count.

Bouge registers on Technorati!

Technorati Profile

The University of Western Ontario announced on August 31, 2006 that it had successfully wooed Sir Martin Gilbert, a Jewish historian and official biographer for Churchill, to be an adjunct research professor in its history department for a five-year term.

The coup was a big feather in Western's cap as Canadian universities intensify their competition for world-class scholars. Scoring these academics leads to prestige, additional research dollars, and better prospects of attracting bright students and professors.

As students increasingly look for the best options in post-secondary education, universities will need to find new and innovative ways to compete with each other. The war for talent has only just begun.

Link to story on Sir Gilbert's new appointment at Western

Maclean's Magazine's annual survey of Canadian universities is out once again, but this time eleven schools, including the Universities of Toronto, Ottawa, Alberta and British Columbia have opted out. They are claiming that they do not agree with the methodology used to do the survey.

In any event, Canada's publicly-funded university system makes rankings largely unimportant. The quality of a liberal arts or science education is largely the same wherever you go. This is in stark contrast with the American university system, where public and private schools co-exist. The private universities enjoy much greater wealth and in general offer greater resources to students and professors. Just consider the awe that the Ivy League universities inspire.

To get into these elite schools, students and parents in the United States are pulling out all the stops. This somewhat fantastic, somewhat scary trend is told in all its sordid detail in a new book by Alexandra Robbins.

Link to The Overarchievers

Many students enter university business programs only to discover that they would much rather apply the management and organizational skills they learned in business school towards public service and community efforts.

In a recent Globe and Mail article (Saturday, August 5, 2006) entitled "Will Work for Change", several former management consultants are profiled in their quest to make a difference in this world, and not just the bottom line.

Richard Durham, formerly of Monitor Group, now runs TurnAround Couriers, a bike courier service staffed by at-risk youth. Sean VanDoorselaer, another Monitor alumnus, is a vice-president at Social Capital Partners, which provides funding and advisory services to start-up social enterprises.

Link to TurnAround Couriers
Link to Social Capital Partners