Noah Campbell (BSc 2020) may have graduated during a global pandemic, but he has not let this slow him down. He has successfully marketed himself as a top-quality employee, with his latest position bringing him back to a familiar employer.

After fulfilling an undergraduate co-op placement at Canada’s BlackBerry, Campbell returned there in the summer of 2022 to focus on technical marketing and solution strategies. He is based in Windsor but travels to the headquarters in Waterloo, as well various locations for collaboration and training.

“I’m helping make sense of a broad and diverse portfolio of solutions to folks with broad and diverse problems ranging from governments and military to the financial industry and even small businesses,” says Campbell.

After graduation, Campbell tried his hand at several other roles, from being part of a government of Canada initiative to give small business supports during the pandemic through Invest WindsorEssex and WEtech Alliance, to working at the Leamington-based internet provider WaveDirect.

“In my position at WaveDirect, I helped successfully write a multi-million-dollar grant proposal to non-technical folks asking them to provide internet access to Pelee Island,” he says.

“In computer science you learn how to do more than simply code software, you learn how to do a presentation, how to write a proper paper, you are creating a story that resonates with them and you learn that because of Science at UWindsor.”

Campbell says his time volunteering at the University was also important in setting him up to succeed in any work situation.

“The opportunity to have that experiential learning as part of a degree and being engaged with different things and applying the classroom learning, that gave me the confidence to walk into different employers and say yes, I can do that: here is an example of when I did that in my undergrad.

“Yeah, I know how to bring researchers together to talk about highly technical concepts because I built a conference.”

During his studies, Campbell volunteered to talk to high-school students at open houses; he helped to organize coding competitions, hackathons, and the 2019 Canadian undergraduate research conference; and he worked on rebuilding internal websites.

“That work built me a network,” he says.

“It becomes so much easier to do when you use the opportunities available to learn other stuff and apply what you learn in class to these extracurricular hands-on activities. I’m applying stuff into real-life scenarios instead of only thinking about them through a book.”

Campbell stresses that the one-on-one attention he got as a computer science undergrad was another key to his success.

“At UWindsor you have the supportive environment from the onset to build you and your skills up to be very transferable wherever you go.”

—Sara Elliott

Because of Science at UWindsor is a series designed to showcase Faculty of Science alumni and the impact of their journey through science.