For Pavak Vyas, the last twelve months have proved to be a year full of change, challenges and zoom meetings. Much like the rest of the world, 2020 threw a curveball to our international recruitment team, who were halted from travel in March 2020. The recruitment team, along with Vyas, worked to figure out how to continue to build relationships with math teachers, counsellors and students around the world, without the ability to travel to spread the good word of Waterloo Mathematics.
As one of the Undergraduate Recruitment & Admissions Officers in the Faculty of Mathematics, Vyas was tasked with continuing to recruit high calibre talent from the Indian subcontinent for our Math and Computer Science programs. Vyas says, “it has been a challenging year, but we’ve pivoted to meeting with students virtually to help them navigate the complex decisions around post-secondary education here in Canada.”
Before the pandemic hit, Vyas had experience travelling to over 1000 schools in India and has met with hundreds of students and parents and he continues to bet big on the potential of Indian students. “Obviously, our recruitment model and tactics have changed a bit,” laughs Vyas.
India is one of the fastest-growing, diverse, and populous economies of the world. It has over 600 million young people under the age of 25 and about 28% of 1.3 billion population is less than 14 years of age. It is expected to overtake China in terms of population by 2030. “There is big potential here for Canadian educators,” says Vyas. Over the years the education system in India has grown tremendously, with more than 1.5 million schools and about 260 million students in 2016, making India the world’s second-largest school system, after China.
One of the hurdles we face in our recruitment efforts is explaining to students and teachers the applicability of a degree in mathematics. Indians traditionally look to mathematics as a stepping stone to become a great engineer or doctor, which is not untrue, but we’re trying to expand their horizons and talk about the careers related to, or rooted back to a degree in mathematics and computer sciences. This is why Vyas spends a lot of time helping the CEMC organise mathematics workshops for younger student audiences to nurture their love for mathematics.
“We’re making headway,” says Vyas, “as we see our applications increase from this part of the world.” This is actually a trend nationwide as Indian students in Canada grew by over 9 times, during 2009 to 2017—a trend that resulted in India becoming the second-largest sender of students after China. This is likely because of a variety of reasons, including study options at top-quality universities, lower tuition fees than in the U.S., Canada’s reputation as an immigrant friendly, safe and multicultural country, as well as thriving Indian immigrant communities in cities like Vancouver or Toronto, which Vyas, as a first-generation migrant from India himself, bets on.
Having been a teacher himself, and someone who has earned a degree at a top-ranking business school, Vyas feels recruitment is not only about marketing and counselling students throughout their application process, but also “about inspiring next generation of mathematicians and computer scientist who would in turn make the world better place for us and our future generations by solving complex real-life problems.” This leads Vyas to have a two-pronged approach to recruiting. He interacts with students and parents through seminars, workshops and recruitment visits, but also plans to positively change math education in India. He is planning to anchor teacher training workshops for mathematics school teachers in India alongside colleagues in the CEMC.
If you are interested in learning more about international outreach workshops, contact Pavak Vyas at pavak.vyas@uwaterloo.ca. For workshops within Canada, visit: https://cemc.uwaterloo.ca/visits.html.
