alan shepard summer residency

More than a program. It’s a CAREER-DEFINING MINDSET.

Learn to leverage your specific background to innovate, solving problems unconventionally.

We’ve spent 10 years at the intersection of talent and industry. Residency is living the experience of seeing entrepreneurship and innovation practices we train our startups on as life skills that will serve you throughout your entire career.

Radical Collaboration

You love being on a team. (Or want to.) We break the silos of traditional education. By placing engineers, artists, and scientists on the same mission, you learn to "speak each other's language", a skill that will define your career in a multidisciplinary world.

Learn while you earn

Get paid for your perspective. This is a professional residency designed for those ready for hands-on experience. This is a full-time, paid position where you tackle complex, real-world mandates that demand your best work, and actionable results.

Accelerated TRANSFORMATION

Compress years into months. Leveraging the District 3 innovation ecosystem, we provide the coaching, mentorship, and on-the-job training needed to fast-track your professional development. You aren't just a participant; you are an essential contributor to a decade-long legacy of impact.

Deep Experimentation

A culture of seeing yourself in new contexts. We borrow the "Residency" model from the arts to create a supportive environment where you are encouraged to explore, pivot, and prototype. We value your curiosity and provide the space to turn it into tangible results.

Stylized orange and white street map showing a detailed urban layout with roads, blocks, and waterways.

WHY THIS ISN'T A TYPICAL "FIRST JOB"

MULTi-INDUSTRY IMMERSION

Address challenges for 3+ clients from different sectors. From 2-person non-profits to national corporations, discover the inner workings of organizations working in Community Support, Arts & Culture, Bio, Venture Capital, Tech, and more.

HIGH-STAKES MANDATES

No coffee runs. You’ll tackle timely, existential problems that will deliver tangible change for Montreal-based organizations.

MAKE YOUR FIRST CAREER STEPS WITH IMPACT.

"I know that these 3 months have taught me what I would have learned in years of professional experience."

Alix

Design and Computation Arts, 2023 Participant

“As a designer, I was planning to do production work, mostly individual, but after residency, I now know that I never want to work alone again."

Neltje

Design & Studio Arts, 2025 Participant

"Residency was a playground for me to test self-limiting beliefs and experiment with new behaviours, skills, and ways of thinking. Leaving this experience, I am more adaptable, self-aware, and communicative, and I feel confident in my ability to further my career."

Lily

Psychology, 2025 Participant

"From supporting a local nonprofit to consulting for a large organization, I gained valuable insight into how organizational size, structure, and mission shape the challenges they face—and how those challenges require tailored, context-specific solutions."

Karolyn

Human Resources, JMSB, 2025 Participant

"Here, you're not just working; you're evolving, experimenting, and contributing to something larger than your immediate surroundings."

Arezoo

Biochemistry, 2023 Participant

"Through the Residency, I learned that the key to helping a client meet their goals is to leverage our unique perspectives, figure out how to meet them where they are in their journeys, and find a common language to best cater to their needs. We are all experts at something."

Gab

Computer Science & Mathematics, 2023 Participant

"The program's emphasis on self-development, self-reflection, and invaluable one-on-one support played a pivotal role in preparing me for future work environments."

Victor

Economics, 2023 Participant

"The residency helped me build my confidence to better share my knowledge and expertise with others."

Delia

Music, 2023 Participant

"The most incredible thing about Residency was working with people from different backgrounds with varying expertise. Having the opportunity to learn together and see the problems from different perspectives is truly something special and unique."

Ryan

Management, 2023 Participant

"This residency helped me learn to see what skills I needed to work on in myself so that I could be proud and confident in what I was bringing to multidisciplinary tables. I will never see large-scale projects and the teamwork they require the same way again. Now I know better what to look at, and how to look."

Connor

Electroacoustics, 2022 Participant

Why Resident?

We borrow the word resident from the realm of the arts, where a residency is a period of immersive, intensive development, often marked by experimentation, exploration, and growth.

‍This Residency is a journey of professional and personal transformation, where participants are nurtured to develop their ideas and skills in a rich, supportive environment. Participants are much more than interns, they are individuals deeply engaged in a process of learning, creating, and impacting.

Here, you're not just working; you're evolving, experimenting, and contributing to something larger than your immediate surroundings.

Four people, two men and two women, collaborating and discussing ideas on a whiteboard with pinned papers in an office.

Corner building with a large colorful mural of a face with blue eyes and hair, under a bright blue sky and next to a leafy tree.

Three people planting colorful flowers in a garden bed along a brick wall outside a building.

Our Program

The Alan Shepard Summer Residency is a multidisciplinary 12-week full-time paid experience at Concordia where soon-to-be and recent graduates from all fields of study experience essential soft and technical skills for personal and professional growth.

In diverse groups, you will address with your varied and unique expertise real problems faced by organizations based in Montreal, in order to tackle big social, economical and environmental challenges.

Expand beyond academia, push yourself out of your comfort zone, pick up essential skills for collaborating deeply with others and learn life-long skills that will change your life.

INTERDISCIPLINARY • ˌɪntərdɪsɪˈplɪnəri

Integrating knowledge and methods from different disciplines, using a synthesis of approaches to address a topic or problem.

TRANSDISCIPLINARY • trænzˌdɪsɪˈplɪnəri

Creating a unity of intellectual frameworks beyond the disciplinary perspectives, involving academic and non-academic participants to address real-world challenges.

ODDS ARE...

If you’re an engineer, odds are you haven’t worked with many filmmakers;
if you’re a musician, odds are you haven’t worked with many economists;
if you’re a journalist, odds are you haven’t worked with many biologists;

LET'S CHANGE THAT.

Odds are you’ll have to work with people from extremely different backgrounds throughout your career.

GET READY
TO MAKE
THE MOST OF IT.

Learn to speak each others' language, and grow together.

what you gain

Innovation Frameworks

Mapping Communities and Interactions; Systems
Iterative Approaches to Work
Foresight & Futures Thinking
Systems & Impact Mapping
Rapid Prototyping
Design thinking & Human-Centered Design

Entrepreneurship & Consulting

Customer Discovery
Client Relationships
Marketing & Data
Project Management
Business Modelling
Effective Research
Storytelling & Presentation
Communication & Positioning

Leadership, Collaboration, & Deep Teamwork

Conflict Resolution
Empathy
Self-organizing Teams
Accountability
Resilience
Time management
Building Consensus
Activity Management: equitable self-assigning & delegation
Team Forming
Active Listening
Critical Thinking
Giving and receiving Feedback effectively
Inclusivity & Amplifying Diverse Perspectives

Self Actualization & Self-efficacy

Humility
Self-Reflexivity
Active Behavioural Change
Personal Goal Setting & Turning Goals Into Action

Industry Exploration & Immersion

Shifting Work Culture
Fostering Ecosystems of Support
Mapping and Fostering Community

previous projects

Here's where your different perspectives tackle real problems together

Market Analysis & Positioning

An alternative food startup seeks to understand their customers more holistically, learn more about customer perspectives in the dairy industry and the place their product can fill in the current market environment.

Residents built strategies and workflows to level up the value of interviews and achieve a product-market fit with more confidence. Residents discovered and validated why customer groups choose to include dairy in their diets and factors that influence the perception of dairy consumption habits across each persona.

Supermarket shelf stocked with various almond milk, coconut milk, kefir, and probiotic drinks in cartons and bottles.

Urban Design for Accessibility and Inclusion

A municipal stakeholder seeks to disrupt the current way that the outdoor spaces along a main street exist and are used throughout the year to encourage foot traffic to linger and experience the area. They want to explore how pedestrianizing a main street to create a year-round venue can foster community-building and community support through a social economy (social behaviors around how we see our local shops, sense of responsibility towards supporting our community, mechanism to combat winter hibernation/isolation behaviors, etc).

Residents built strategies to use snow as a building material to change the functionality of the street in the winter, identified and validated key strategic arts projects to foster empathy and care for local businesses, and rapid-tested methods of gamification to drive engagement across different demographics of people frequenting the area.

Person wearing a black coat with a fur-lined hood walking on a snowy city sidewalk with snow falling.

Strengthening Community Ties Filling Unmet Needs

A food bank and social service provider seeks to identify their unique value within a community that has other providers offering similar social services. They wish to better understand who they are servicing and how they can respond in a more targeted way to unmet needs in the community. More specifically, they seek to understand the way justice, equity, diversity and inclusion impacts the need for and access to social services so that they may better respond to the needs of marginalized groups within their community.

Residents developed methods for identifying and segmenting the different personas of current and potential service recipients, clients, and other beneficiaries. By developing a strategy that leans on data collection and use as the community (and therefore service offered) evolves, segmenting allowed for unique approaches that would benefit particular segments such as fostering intergenerational relations to use oral history as a community strengthening mechanism. Residents responded to needs for other personas with strategies for providing urban agriculture training and venues, again with an angle to encourage intergenerational ties.

Reusable green and red shopping bags filled with assorted groceries including canned goods, beverages, and packaged food.

Blurry image of a crowd at a pink-lit event or concert with people facing away from the camera.

Positioning, strategy, and Community Engagement

An arts center seeks to identify their core value in the face of relocation and integration into a new geographical community. More specifically, they want to understand in what ways building and engaging their local community will enable them to understand themselves in this new environment.

Residents crafted a strategy built upon a multi-faceted approach to strengthen community ties by leveraging contexts and the impact of a multiplicity – reaching the same communities in different ways. Leaning on oral histories, grassroots values for knowledge and information sharing, and strategic partnerships across industry and neighborhood boundaries allowed for an unconventional solution that positioned the arts center as a future pillar of the community they begin to foster today.

Two people sitting closely outdoors during dusk, one with curly red hair wearing a denim jacket, the other with blonde hair and glasses behind them.

User Needs & Unique Value Proposition

A film festival seeks to grow beyond a time-bound, in-person experience, and would like to understand the audiences they might be able to reach, what these audiences will be looking for, and which ones are most easily addressable given the current resources and relationships of the festival.

Residents redefined the business model, inspecting previously untapped audiences to project a sustainable transition towards a new service offering of the film festival. By assessing and prioritizing possible partnerships with universities to integrate the festival’s catalogue into academic coursework, determining cost-effective methods to grow younger audiences, and a shift beyond only curating works to include sponsoring independent creation, residents provided a comprehensive menu of feasible first steps in a new direction.

Person wearing a straw hat walking through a tall green cornfield under a partly cloudy sky.

Communication & Public Perception

An NGO is seeking to adapt IP sharing models for cellular agriculture in the current environment, foster open dialogue and sharing of knowledge, research, and technology among stakeholders of all levels, from farmers to legislators. They seek to instill the importance and urgency of maintaining a strong food supply in Canada going forward, and make research more accessible to stakeholders to do so.

Residents developed, and validated models to help shift mindsets, vulgarize scientific writing, and instill urgency in the national ecosystem.

FAQ

How long does it take for a tomato to grow?

Montreal is classified as a plant hardiness zone 5A, so probably about 5 weeks?

You’ll probably want to start them indoors if you can 🍅

‍

Can I attend the Residency from my sofa?

Not at all. But you can try ours, in our beautiful co-working space in Downtown Montreal!

The Residency is held in person, at D3 Innovation Hub space. Here, you’ll have the opportunity to meet inspiring people and work in a creative and disruptive environment.

+ we have an excellent Korean BBQ just down the street (and they have seed-eater options!)

When and how long is the program?

The program lasts 12 Weeks, from May 4th to the end of July

How does the application process work?

Join our info session March 18th at 4pm (sign up at the top of this page), where you can learn more about the program and how to submit a strong application.

Applications open immediately following the info session. Then, you’ll have until April 5th to submit your application.

For those who are selected, the second stage is an interactive workshop date TBD (either AM or PM)

For those who are selected, the third stage is a brief individual interview on April 13th, 14th, or 15th

Residency begins May 4th

Do I need specific skills?

Do you have experience in circus administration? Mythical creature habitat design? Vegetable geometry? Robot therapeutics?

Probably not, but don’t you worry, any expertise is worth having in a deliberately trans-disciplinary team. We’re looking for people who are curious, passionate, respectful, self-reflexive and eager to develop themselves. These are the real qualifications!

‍

Who is it for?

Soon-to-be or recently graduated Concordia students of any faculties. Participants are respectful, eager to learn, and from diverse backgrounds.

The residency is for you if you yearn for the opportunity to build skills that you may not have explored during your degree, but that are essential for effective teamwork in work and personal growth as well as relationship wellbeing.

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Concordia University is located on unceded Indigenous lands. The Kanien’kehá:ka Nation is recognized as the custodians of the lands and waters on which we gather today. Tiohtià:ke/Montréal is historically known as a gathering place for many First Nations. Today, it is home to a diverse population of Indigenous and other peoples. We respect the continued connections with the past, present and future in our ongoing relationships with Indigenous and other peoples within the Montreal community.