When Shane McIntosh began his career in academia at the University of Guelph-Humber, it was a different, but still quite familiar place.
McIntosh’s experience will resonate with any current UofGH student. He chose the school in part because of the opportunity to get real-world field experience. And he found that the close-knit community allowed him to get to know professors who later encouraged him to explore graduate studies.
McIntosh did indeed go on to get a master’s degree in software engineering from Queen’s University before joining McGill University as Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
“There were some really great educators who were part of the program at UofGH,” McIntosh said recently from Montreal. “UofGH was definitely a building block for me in my career.”
McIntosh’s responsibilities at McGill include leading the Software Repository Excavation and Build Engineering Labs (the Software REBELS). With his students, McIntosh performs empirical studies that mine the historical data that is generated during the development of large-scale software systems. To put it more simply, McIntosh and his team probe the historical software data to try to learn from mistakes and make smarter decisions going forward.
He also teaches software engineering courses and serves on a broad array of committees.
McIntosh was recently honoured with the University of Guelph-Humber Award of Achievement at the 2017 Alumni Reunion, an award he calls “wonderful.”
Given that he chose to continue in an academic career, he sometimes still sees former UofGH professors socially. It was those professors and courses that initially helped McIntosh decide that software engineering was his passion.
“When I first started, I wasn’t quite sure whether I wanted to focus on software or hardware solutions, and that became clear to me through my education at UofGH,” he said.
“UofGH was a great piece of the puzzle for my career.”
