Deeptech isn’t a word that you’ll hear much at career fairs or university open days. The educational path into it isn’t anything like as well demarcated as those of more traditional fields like medicine, law and finance. 

But in our experience, if you ask smart young people who like STEM subjects whether they could picture themselves one day running a company that makes paradigm-disrupting inventions, there’s a good chance you’ll see signs the idea has a lot of appeal. After all, who doesn’t like the sound of a career that gives you the freedom to dive deep into a field you love and turn your wildest ideas into real products (and profit)?

One great preparation for a career in deeptech is to get a solid educational grounding not only in a STEM subject but also in business and management studies. Unfortunately, undergraduate degree options allowing that don’t get as much attention as they should.

Over the last twelve months, RiSC has had the pleasure of working with Cameron Cloughley, who joined us as a co-op student. He’s in the final semester of the dual degree in mathematics and business run jointly by Waterloo and Laurier universities, and so we invited him to share his perspective on what it’s like to take a dual degree in a STEM field and business/management. Here’s what he had to say:

‍I didn’t choose my degree program because of any specific career ambition. My outlook in high school was basically this: I like math a lot and I enjoy what I’m learning in business classes, so I want to take a program that encapsulates all that. When I researched different schools, I found out Laurier and Waterloo’s dual degree in math and business offered the best scope for me to study both subject areas on an equal footing. Laurier handles the business side of the program, while all the math happens at Waterloo.

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Theory and Practice

The unique value of my program, I think, is the extra insights its two sides bring to one another. If you study math on its own, it’s not that easy to get a clear picture of how what you’re studying gets used out in the real world. But in the business side of my course, I get to see all the business problems that math solves, which makes you appreciate how awesomely powerful math can be. And vice versa, if you study business alone, some of the ways you’re expected to work with numbers for purposes such as analysing financials may seem a bit arbitrary or unnecessarily complicated, but if you’re studying math at the same time, you can buy into them more easily, because you understand the theories and principles they’re based on.

The Black-Scholes model is an example of what I’m talking about here. If you study it as a mathematician who has no knowledge of financial instruments, you’ll only appreciate the model to the extent that you find it stimulating on an intellectual level. You’ll never have a sense of exactly what’s at stake when it comes to getting option pricing right. On the other hand, if you’re studying financial management and being asked to apply it when you don’t fully understand all the mathematical concepts underpinning it, things can get frustrating.

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Primed for Co-ops

The big payoff of the dual degree really became clear to me when I started doing co-op placements. I’ve done these in a range of environments—ecommerce, the public sector, and now VC—and each time I’ve found myself drawing on knowledge from both sides of my degree. What’s more, I think the constant dialogue between the two subject areas that I’ve developed through the program gives me more angles for approaching paradigms and practices that are new to me, helping me to fully get my head around them quicker. Co-ops make such a big difference to your skills development and future employability—so much so, by the way, that I’d recommend paying close attention to the co-op opportunities a program offers when you’re applying to schools—and there’s no question in my mind that my dual degree has helped me get the most out of my co-op work.

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Dual Degrees and Deeptech: Ideal for Innovators and Investors 

Thinking specifically about deeptech, I can absolutely see how the dual specialism becomes even more useful. Whether you’re involved in it as an investor or an entrepreneur, you have two levels of complexity to deal with—not just the financial, commercial, strategic and other aspects of the business side, but also the technical sophistication of the intellectual property itself. Obviously, the founders need to be talented researchers and innovators in their domain, but the investors need to have a high level of STEM expertise so they can make proper sense of the technical claims they hear in pitches and the reports that the domain experts in their network prepare for them.

Now that I’m approaching graduation and thinking more about my next career steps, I’ve realized that, if you want to be a deeptech entrepreneur, doing a dual degree is a strategically smart move. You can’t really build a company around an emerging technology if you don’t have serious research expertise, which basically means you need to go to grad school. Now, I’m not speaking from first-hand experience here, but I would guess that when you’re studying at that more advanced level, you don’t have a lot of time or mental bandwidth to study business and management. A dual degree lets you take care of that early on in your university career, meaning you won’t be playing catch-up later on.

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Sacrifices

Taking a dual degree does require some sacrifices that you need to be aware of before you commit to one. The first sacrifice is your time. In Ontario, a normal university degree is 40 credits. My degree is around 55. So even though the “double” part of the degree doesn’t mean you’re doing twice as much work, you’ll still have quite a lot of extra study on your plate.

Another dimension to this time sacrifice is the careful planning work you need do to make sure there aren’t any scheduling conflicts between the various courses you plan on taking each semester. If your double degree is provided jointly by two separate universities, as mine is, scheduling becomes even trickier, because you have to deal with two separate administrative systems.

Lastly, when you do a dual program, you have to sacrifice freedom when it comes to electives. On standard undergrad programs, you have some space to take courses across different departments and faculties. But with a double degree, most of your electives go towards the two subjects you’re majoring in. 

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Try Before You Buy

All that said, if you’re considering a dual program but aren’t sure about sacrifices like these, I have good news: there’s generally good scope for switching from a dual program into a single one. As the semesters have gone by, quite a lot of people from my original cohort have dropped one side of the program to concentrate on the other. So if you’re at the application stage and are going back and forth between either business or a STEM subject, applying for a dual degree makes sense, because it will give you the chance to try out both.