By: Tomiwa Ademidun and Melissa Wen

This is an excerpt of the biomedical chapter in our ebook, The Atila Schools and Jobs Guide | The Best Canadian Universities for the Best Jobs

McMaster is Really Good for Biomedical Jobs but Average at other Industries

When we looked at the previous three industries, Tech, Investment Banking and Consulting, McMaster was nowhere to be found in the top 5. Yet, immediately we looked at Biomedical companies, it consistently placed in the top five for every single company.

McMaster’s high ranking in the biomedical industry makes both perfect sense and absolutely no sense. It makes sense because McMaster is known for its strong health sciences program so we would expect it to rank highly in biomedical. What makes no sense is the fact that it ranked so lowly in the other industries. Usually, a school that ranks in the Top 5 in one of the three industries we looked at, ranked in the top 5 in at least another industry as well.

The primary reason for this might be that the biomedical industry is very different from tech and business industries. For tech, investment banking and consulting, the attributes that might make one school great for recruiting in tech might also make it great for recruiting in consulting and so forth. But as we will show later on, the biomedical industry is quite unique from other industries in how it’s recruiting process works, so it seems like McMaster’s strong performance in the biomedical field doesn’t translate as well into other industries.

French Schools have a Recruiting Advantage

Similar to how we saw that McGill had a huge advantage when recruiting for Investment banking because they faced less competition from out of province students for positions at Montreal or Quebec based companies. This advantage also exists in the biomedical industries.

McGill consistently ranked in the top 5 for Tech, Investment Banking and Consulting, so it's no surprise that it’s also the second best school for biomedical jobs. What was more interesting is the rapid rise of the University of Montreal. This school shot up from dead last in Tech and Investment banking rankings all the way to 3rd in Biomedical.

I haven’t seen a comeback this rapid since Lebron joined the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2014 and took them from 10th in the Eastern conference to NBA Champions in just two seasons. Which is why I call University of Montreal, the 2016 Cleveland Cavaliers of Biomedical schools.

This might be explained by the fact that Quebec is a major part of the Canadian pharmaceutical industry, it receives 28.3% of R&D Spend compared to 50.9% in Ontario. Large pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer and Novartis also have their headquarters in Canada. Furthermore, while there might be a larger supply of jobs in Ontario, there is also more demand and competition for these jobs because Ontario is a predominantly speaking English country. 

All of which creates an environment that allows graduates of Quebec schools to have numerous job opportunities available to them, while dealing with less competition.