From Classroom to Career | William Kourlas

When William Kourlas graduated from university, what set him apart wasn’t just where he landed, but how he got there. Over the course of five co-op terms — all completed with the same employer — he transformed from a cautious student navigating his first professional environment into a trusted full-time contributor working on complex distributed systems.

That journey was made possible by work-integrated learning. ICTC's Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) Digital program provides wage subsidies to employers across Canada’s critical sectors, helping post-secondary students gain meaningful paid work experience through opportunities like co-op placements while still in school. For William, the program offered more than work experience — it provided continuity, mentorship and the confidence to grow at a professional pace.

Building a foundation, step by step

William entered co-op while completing a demanding double degree: computer science at the University of Waterloo alongside a business degree from Wilfrid Laurier University. His first three placements with Solace — an Ottawa-based data-streaming provider — coincided with the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, meaning his early co-op experiences were fully remote. While the work was real, the environment was unfamiliar, and the learning curve steep.

Those initial terms focused largely on quality assurance: testing software, running scripts, and identifying bugs. The work laid an important foundation. “Productivity was the biggest early lesson,” William explains. “Understanding systems, learning syntax, and figuring out how real teams actually work together.”

As his co-op terms progressed, so did the complexity of his responsibilities. He moved into development roles, working across multiple teams and programming languages, and contributing directly to features within large real-world codebases. That exposure paid dividends back at school. Courses like operating systems — notorious for their scale and complexity — became more manageable thanks to his comfort navigating unfamiliar code.

“University gives you structure, but working at a company is different,” William says. “You’re building something real, often without a perfectly defined spec. You’re learning how to figure things out.”

Confident and trusted to deliver

The most significant shift across William’s five co-op terms was personal, not technical. Confidence, he says, was the biggest change. “Early on, the scale of professional software development felt overwhelming.” Over time, however, repetition, mentorship and increasing responsibility helped replace uncertainty with assurance. “Each time I came back to Solace there were higher expectations, but also greater trust.”

By co-op terms four and five, William was no longer rotating through basic tasks. He was contributing features, resolving complex bugs, and eventually joining a team focused on distributed systems, an area where challenges multiply quickly due to network reliability, state consistency and scale.

“That work gave me the most confidence,” he says. “It’s complicated, and it takes time to learn, but eventually you start picking up speed. You’re no longer treated like a student, you’re trusted to deliver.”

A realistic and supported progression

When the full-time offer with Solace came, “it felt validating,” William says, adding that in a competitive job market where junior developers often struggle to stand out, his five co-op terms meant he wasn’t starting from scratch. He already understood the product, the culture and the expectations, and perhaps most importantly, his employer knew what he could do.

Looking back, William sees co-op not as a single opportunity, but as a progression that allowed him to grow at a realistic pace, supported by structure and mentorship. His advice to students considering work-integrated learning opportunities is simple: “Stick with it. You don’t need to have everything figured out right away. What matters is showing up, learning, and taking each step seriously.”
 

About ICTC’s WIL Digital Program

ICTC’s Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) Digital program provides eligible Canadian employers with grants to subsidize up to 50 percent of a student’s salary over their term. The program takes place over three terms a year: Winter, Spring/Summer, and Fall. Since 2017, it has facilitated over 23,000 student placements with more than 4,000 employers across Canada, and over 65 percent of placed students identifying as belonging to underrepresented groups.

ICTC’s Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) Digital program is funded by the Government of Canada's Student Work Placement Program (SWPP).

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