Every journey starts with a single step. For Stephen Kinsella, though, it was more of a conversation. A professor of economics by training, Kinsella is codirector of University of Limerick’s (UL) immersive software engineering programme, which has transformed how prospective software engineers are trained.
It all started with a conversation over dinner in 2019 between Kinsella, Stripe founders John and Patrick Collison and Intercom co-founder Des Traynor.
“It was conversation around computer science courses – they should feature more learning by doing, more internships, they should be at the prestige level of medicine or law, that they actually should feature a more diverse group,” explains Kinsella. “It was no more than that.”
But it sparked an idea. Kinsella continued the conversation with his colleagues in the computer science department. Between them, they came up with a proposal for a new course that would change how the subject was taught.
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“The proposal said essentially we should treat computer science education the way we treat medical education. It should be more intense – more than 40 weeks a year – it should feature way more placements, and it should feature more learning by doing, practical problem-based learning as opposed to lecture time,” Kinsella said.
The immersive software engineering (ISE) course certainly has changed things. The course is a hybrid, an integrated bachelor’s-to-master’s pathway, with students earning a bachelor of science degree in 2½ years. Stay on for the extra year and students get a master’s degree instead. Out of the first cohort of students, the majority remained on to do the master’s, graduating in August. Those who finished with the undergraduate degree found employment in companies such as Stripe, Tines and Intercom (now known as Fin).
It includes five residencies, with students placed with partner companies.
“A student can go to Stripe, Amazon, a start-up, the Department of Justice and then finish in a social enterprise like FoodCloud,” says Kinsella.
That puts students out in the workplace tackling real-world problems and products, such as working on an early detection and intervention tool for cerebral palsy in infants at the Infant centre in University College Cork. Others have worked on wireless battery management systems and home-protection tools.
It’s designed to not just produce the next Stripe employee, but the next John and Patrick Collison
— Stephen Kinsella
The backing of the industry has become a core part of the course. Costs for it are high compared with other approaches, Kinsella says, and the State resources don’t meet the needs. To help bridge that gap, the course has a partner network, with companies paying a contribution for every placement. It started out with 12, now the number stands at more than 70 and it is growing.
Kinsella acknowledges it was a strange proposition to put to companies – paying the university to educate more students so the companies could pay them as employees in the future – but the case for backing the course was strong. Students finishing the course would have more experience and technical expertise thanks to the placements, and they would also have more experience of different workplace cultures.
Another key element to the plan was to aggressively recruit for the course, tempting students from other high-prestige courses.
“Take a brilliant student that is going to study theoretical physics at Trinity and change their mind – and change their mother’s mind,” Kinsella explains. “That’s what has happened. Essentially we have students that were going to choose medicine or law. Now they’re choosing immersive software engineering.”
For recent graduate Amy Mahon, choosing ISE and staying on to complete the master’s degree was natural.
“I was really interested in the modules they were teaching in the master’s – artificial intelligence and machine learning,” she says. “I had such a positive experience with ISE with the staff, the residencies, everything we learned that I thought if I was going to do a master’s, there was no better one for me. It kind of just made sense to do it.”
Mahon is starting a job as engineer with Analog Devices, where she did her final residency. Having that experience has given her a good base to start her career.
“It made everything I was learning in college make more sense to me,” she says.
Sixteen students have finished the four-year course, earning a master’s degree. All of them have secured jobs of some sort, either with partner companies or, in one case, their own start-up, Kinsella says. Two students have been accepted into Y Combinator, others have commercialisation fund applications with Enterprise Ireland.
That fulfils another key aim of the course: to grow the ecosystem in Ireland rather than simply provide a conveyor belt of tech talent for the multinationals here. “It’s designed to not just produce the next Stripe employee, but the next John and Patrick Collison,” Kinsella says.
“We’ve constructed an ecosystem of excellence. These are excellent students, excellent companies. Excellent teachers and facilities and then the outcomes are excellent,” says Kinsella. “We let people choose what they feel is their highest reward. We don’t prescribe where they go. The course is designed to produce really, really good software engineers who know how to work in businesses.”
Key to that is the feedback loop that keeps the curriculum in line with what the industry needs, rather than what academia has decided to teach. That work-integrated learning approach is not a new concept at UL, but the pace of change in the tech industry has posed a particular challenge to keeping education up to date with the needs of the industry.
Stripe’s head of education, Alison Ahern, says the process involved intense collaboration and refining the course to make sure the curriculum was right.
“It’s been a constant conversation between the team here and ISE, and then all of the industry partners,” she says.
“We would constantly do curriculum reviews and make sure the course is keeping pace, and then the students themselves, when they go on to residencies and their experience. It’s just a whole huge feedback loop from them, from the partner network and from the team itself to really keep pace with the industry.”
A strength of the course is the emphasis it places on so-called soft skills – communication, collaboration, the non-technical skills that help build effective teams. As part of the ongoing assessment process, students take part in the “Epic”, where they work on a large-scale project together, implementing the concepts that the course has introduced. That is where the team dynamics emerge, with students breaking off into smaller collaborative teams to tackle parts of the project.
“As AI kind of advances, I think there’s going to be a greater premium placed on soft skills on that ability to be the person who can work in a team and make things happen,” says Kinsella. “That’s something that AI obviously cannot do at the moment.”
The course has grown and accepts about 50 students a year. Kinsella says it was important to keep things small in the early years to make sure the course was hitting the right notes. It was a learning experience, he says.
But despite the development of the course in the past four years, that first set of master’s graduates will always be a special cohort. Ahern describes them as “incredible”.
“They are the group that took the bet on ISE and turned an empty building and an idea into a reality.”
