University of Waterloo Students Win Facebook's Hackathon

http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/news/facebook-hackathon

by meangeme • 14 years ago

162 114 14 years ago

velocity.uwaterloo.ca

x711li_yc• 14 years ago

Waterloo seems to be killing it this week (BufferBox acquisition, virtual brain, Facebook Hackathon)

kymchiho3• 14 years ago

Indeed, big things in the pipeline!

strider_g3• 14 years ago

yeayea, waterloo ;)

shuw• 14 years ago

Maybe I'm getting old (closing on 30) and nostalgic but the new generation of Waterloo students are making me proud and seem to be going further than my classes.

Although, I'm also gaining a little pride myself. I did was a research assistant at CTN and built the first UI tool for building the brain model. And I just joined Facebook and had the Waterloo students win the hackathon next door on my second week :)

otoburb2• 14 years ago

My understanding is that Waterloo has been a Microsoft and RIM software talent poaching ground for over a decade. The Waterloo Engineering and CS programs are known for their extremely high quality and rigour.

The recent string of higher profile alumni successes reinforces this reputation and serves as a beacon for Canadian high-school graduate intake. Now if only they would do something about the concrete jungle they call their campus :)

timothya2• 14 years ago

I agree that it's mostly a concrete jungle, but there are some new buildings going up. The new Quantum Nano Centre just opened a few months ago, and it looks pretty spiffy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAZXcVLMMG0

mindcruzer• 14 years ago

No kidding. The buildings are getting nicer but there is almost no green space left on campus.

guyzero3• 14 years ago

Waterloo was a MSFT poaching ground when I was an undergrad in 1992... well before RIM was even on the scene. Macleans magazine has consistently ranked it the best engineering school in Canada. They've been winning ACM programming contests since the math building had the dinosaur pit (http://ist.uwaterloo.ca/cs/redroom/).

As for campus being ugly... hey, you can't have everything.

acchow6• 14 years ago

It has now become a Google/FB/MSFT/Amazon poaching ground.

stevenameyer4• 14 years ago

While Waterloo has been a talent poaching ground for Microsoft and RIM for a while, and more recently for Google, Facebook and the likes. The thing i think that really gets overlooked is the startup community in the area.

With an incubator residence on campus (http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/)

Another new incubator in the region (http://hyperdrive.communitech.ca/#applyNow)

An organization dedicated to helping startups in the are (https://www.communitech.ca/)

The recent successes of companies like BufferBox and Kik, have showed that startups can succeed and thrive in the area.

kymchiho3• 14 years ago

Great links, it's a solid place to kickstart an idea.

a3camero2• 14 years ago

I talked to an MS recruiter a couple years ago who said they hired more graduates from Waterloo than any other school.

mtw• 14 years ago

Winning for Waterloo hackathon or global hackathon? it's not clear in the article

psobot• 14 years ago

Facebook's global university hackathon.

Permit• 14 years ago

There were 17 teams apparently, here's a better article: http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2012/12/01/facebook-universit...

cbhl6• 14 years ago

Technically, they've won both. To qualify for the global hackathon, they had to win the local one first.

xspectre3• 14 years ago

Good job Waterloo. Water Water Water - Loo Loo Loo!

supersaiyan4• 14 years ago

it's Water Water Water - Wu Wu Wu

wensi• 14 years ago

Proud to be a UW student!

eloelz• 14 years ago

as a Waterloo grad this year, gratz!

AYBABTME4• 14 years ago

Congrats on the win, and cool publicity... but how can I get in there at 12k$ a year, plus a rent and food and other expenses. How much will it pay off, versus my education at the University of Ottawa?

Given that I learn much more by myself, reading reference books, taking online courses with coursera, doing projects by myself. Is there any return on investment that I could expect from an education there, instead of my current university?

JL2010• 14 years ago

>doing projects by myself.

Probably not given that limitation. I didn't go to UofW but I spent about a year in Waterloo on an internship. In terms of the experience that you'll get out of it, one of their biggest assets is probably the type of students that they draw - if you won't be working and learning with/from them, then it probably won't be worth it.

AYBABTME4• 14 years ago

'by myself' I meant of my own initiative/not part of a course. I love working/learning from other people.

amackera• 14 years ago

I'm a uwaterloo alumni. I have to say that the single greatest reason to attend a university such as Waterloo is to meet like-minded people who are as passionate as yourself. Learning is not just about knowledge, it's about building experience.

paulgb3• 14 years ago

Waterloo has a co-op program where you switch off every four months between working and school. The co-ops can be very well compensated, so many students graduate with little or no student debt.

speg• 14 years ago

Came here to say this. I finished w/ $40k in the bank but the experiences gave me so much more.

AYBABTME4• 14 years ago

Got the exact same things in many other canadian universities. uOttawa has it, for instance. I'm doing it, too.

goosling3• 14 years ago

It should also be noted that several programs at UW are offered in the regular sense (i.e. no co-op) as well. Engineering is the only faculty with mandatory co-op for all undergraduates.

sliverstorm2• 14 years ago

That sounds fantastic. When I graduated, I was absolutely thrilled to be working on "real stuff that matters". It would have been a great morale booster to be able to properly mix that in with school

akashVaswani2• 14 years ago

The thing with the university of waterloo is the opportunity for where you coop. How many people at UOttawa get jobs with Facebook, google, apple, MS, twitter and various startups in the valley with jobs paying in excess of $30 an hour?

To give you an idea of how popular UW is in the valley, right now apple has 50~ interns, about 35~ of which are from Waterloo, and a couple from BC. The rest are from the states. And this is the case in many of the companies down here.

cbhl6• 14 years ago

I'm of the opinion that you learn way more by actually doing things at a start-up, small business, or Facebook or Google, and that Waterloo is great for giving you the opportunity to do that. Sure, the lectures are useful for theory of computing and algorithms, but if you're here wanting to learn how to program or how to write SQL, you're wasting your money and time.

That said, the last UOttawa student I knew who transferred to Waterloo failed their first term here, so don't do it just because people on HN said so.

10dpd• 14 years ago

For the last year I've been aware of the impact of Waterloo in tech and have conducted some research into why this might be so. Two things I've discovered:

1. Academic staff own any IP resulting from their research, making it very attractive and easy to recruit top academics. Almost all other universities assume ownership of IP.

2. An intern program that requires students to take an internship every other semester, enabling students to gain valuable experience within top-tier tech companies.

It would be great to hear of any other reasons for their success.

AYBABTME4• 14 years ago

I would think, massive investment from RIM back when their situation was not as bad.

The influx of money helps the university finance research and various enterprises, which in turn results in yet more success stories, and yet more investments. It's a virtuous circle I guess.

throwaway1979• 14 years ago

I think those are two very strong reasons. However, at the end of the day, Waterloo puts its students through the meat grinder. My nephew studies there and I am blown away by the stuff he is getting taught in first and second year.

The thing that surprised me was when he tried to apply to Silicon Valley start-ups, he got very limited response. I think part of it is that people don't realize how awesome Waterloo is.

supersaiyan4• 14 years ago

I agree on the second part, I can get interviews with google/microsoft/facebook, etc, basically the big tech companies. But its far more difficult getting interviews from start ups in SV

potatolicious• 14 years ago

Top-tier major US employers all know about Waterloo's reputation, and recruit very heavily there. Most startups are completely unaware of Waterloo, but so many Waterloo grads earn their stripes at a major top-tier employer (Google, Facebook, MS, etc) that many of them (including myself) graduate out into the greater world of US startups.

brandonb• 14 years ago

My startup (8 people) recently started interviewing at Waterloo, and the quality of students is every bit as good as MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, or CMU. Right now Waterloo is the best-kept secret in startup recruiting, but given how good the students are I doubt it will stay that way for long.

PakG1• 14 years ago

The story is that Bill Gates would personally phone the #1 graduating student of Waterloo every year to offer him a job, no questions asked. In some circles, Waterloo's very highly regarded.

pav3l• 14 years ago

Waterloo is well known in Canada for having an exceptional Mathematics program (if I'm not mistaken you graduate with BMath, not a BA/BSc with a math major).

paulgb3• 14 years ago

You're correct, it's BMath.

timothya2• 14 years ago

Waterloo is correspondingly one of the only universities with a whole faculty devoted to math. It's one of the reasons I chose to study at Waterloo: I get a lot more math in computer science than I would elsewhere.

a3camero2• 14 years ago

Something missing from the list is how vibrant it is: it's a hard-working student body + people who attend the school for tech + local companies.

-Waterloo grad

stevenameyer4• 14 years ago

There is also a large focus on entrepreneurship. There's a lot of support for students to start their own businesses. Such as an incubator residence (http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/). I also know that when my brother decided to leave school to work with a startup in the area the school told him that if he ever wanted to finish his degree he just needed to tell them.

paulgb3• 14 years ago

The university also has an on-campus tech incubator for ground-level projects and an off-site workspace for early/medium-stage projects. Through the incubator the university also provides seed-level funding for students to turn projects into businesses (BufferBox was one recipient).

guyzero3• 14 years ago

For better or worse because of the university's reputation they now attract the best students coming in and, guess what, they graduate the best students at the end. Like many great universities they benefit from selection bias. If you're a Canadian kid who wants to get the best CS or engineering education then U Waterloo is on your shortlist. (That said, it's not the only really good school for CS or engineering in the country as some U of T grad will probably be quick to point out.)

mahyarm• 14 years ago

Waterloo is the MIT of Canada, so it attracts top Canadian tech students. It's also in the most populated region of Canada, so it being close to home (but not too close) for most students helps too.

grannyg00se• 14 years ago

That co-op program is responsible for me being in software development. I started in CivEng, but every co-op term I had was a programming position. So I happily dropped CivEng and started doing what I had been doing on my own from a young age.

The co-op program is also the primary reason I chose Waterloo. You can't beat paying for school as you progress through your terms. Back then you could earn enough during a work term to fully pay for next term's fees and books.

xspectre3• 14 years ago

I agree the co-op system is one of UWaterloo's greatest advantages. Not only do students earn money to pay tuition, they get work experience at global tech companies (Microsoft, RIM, Amazon, Qualcomm, Nvidia). Many undergrads graduate with an offer from one of the companies where they interned.

otoburb2• 14 years ago

For folks who don't quite understand the difference, the 4-month alternating co-op program at Waterloo is distinctly different from the long-term 12-16month co-op employment program at University of Toronto (aka Professional Experience Year).

Both have obvious strengths and weaknesses when looking at the employment time horizon vs. employment variety. When I applied to both schools in the mid-90s I viewed the longer employment term at UofT as higher value and ended up there.

In retrospect, I underestimated the value of Waterloo's 4-month co-op programs. At the time, I feared I wouldn't be able to work on projects requiring longer-time horizons having heard second and third-hand anecdotes of some students getting crappy 4-month co-op assignments.

In terms of defraying tuition costs, I figured earned salary was about equal between the two options (4-5 Waterloo co-op terms == 1 UofT PEY term).

pokoleo• 14 years ago

You can still do it.

azundo• 14 years ago

Culture is also a big reason. People at Waterloo talk about engineering/CS/whatever non-stop. A colleague of mine went back to do his PhD at Western and his biggest observation was that the kids in the hall weren't talking about what project they were working on, they were talking about parties and clothes and whatever. While selection certainly helps with this, the culture of a school also has a huge impact in this regard.

acchow6• 14 years ago

Absolutely agree. Late at night in the labs in MC, it is not uncommon to hear students arguing about functional vs. OOP paradigms or the relevancy of SQL in "big data".

simarpreet007• 14 years ago

I couldn't agree more!

Breakthrough• 14 years ago

Blanket statements make Breakthrough sad :(

Your colleague probably did not base that on the engineering or CS buildings. Plenty of times I've bumped into a colleague and had a long-winded discussion about software radios, or have fun debates regarding our favourite programming languages - not to mention the projects we've got on the run...

srlake3• 14 years ago

This ties into #1 and important to also mention:

Undergraduate students also own all of their own IP. If you want to commercialize something you've worked on in school, you don't even need to deal with a tech transfer office: you just do it.

kymchiho3• 14 years ago

Huge incentive. More time to focus on the idea, less time spend on how to protect it.

edwinnathaniel• 14 years ago

As for #2, that's common in Canada.

UBC, SFU, and most of the top-tier schools here have what we call a "Co-op" program that is open for both undergrad and grad students.

Typical placement is 4 months long but some companies prefer 8 months (2 terms). Students start their co-op program probably by the end of their second year so that they at least have some foundations.

Most schools have their internal websites where companies can post job-descriptions and students can apply to these jobs.

I don't know if this is true for all provinces but at least in British Columbia, the government subsidized these co-op programs by paying half (or even more?) of the students salary (oh yes, co-op placements are paid internship). This is a BIG BIG plus as it makes placement easier to swallow for the companies.

I've done 16 months of co-op with various roles (Build, QA, Integration, Dev) and greatly appreciated all parties (school, employers/companies, government) that make this happen.

ampersandy• 14 years ago

I'd say #3, similar to other top schools, is that your fellow classmates inspire you with the work they do and the projects they create. It's hard to not want to push yourself to really improve your skills when you see your friends win a global Facebook hackathon, work at top-tier companies, release projects that get over half a million users; it's a huge motivator for me personally. I bet many others feel the same way.

icewater• 14 years ago

What does this have to do with ninjas or quotes?

goosling3• 14 years ago

icewater: Ninjaquote was our winning project for the regional Waterloo Hackathon. It was a name chosen at the (nearly) last minute, when the domain with the name that we originally wanted wasn't available. :) -- Jinny

j-b• 14 years ago

I was just in Waterloo at a database technical conference and most of the folks I worked with were very smart people with BMaths from UW. Google, Sybase , SAP, Oracle, Intel, etc.. all have offices to snap up the technical talent there.

kitcar• 14 years ago

As someone interested in recruiting from Waterloo, but not from the school/area - where are the best places to make job postings / network?

stevenameyer4• 14 years ago

Well if your looking to hire Co-ops from the university here is the link https://uwaterloo.ca/jobmine/employers

alexakarpov• 14 years ago

That!

cbhl6• 14 years ago

Be wary the CECA has been known to give smaller employers sub-optimal advice. You'll want to get someone who understands the process to help you through it. If top students don't understand the benefits of working for your particular organization it's possible that they'll pick a safe job at a Google or Microsoft over you, and you'll get a mediocre student (or worse, none at all) after the first round of matching.

supersaiyan4• 14 years ago

We have an internal job posting, you can access it here at jobmine.uwaterloo.ca; there are separate postings for co-op and alumni students.

meangeme2• 14 years ago

The university has it's own job site for co-op students, Jobmine. You can find more info here, https://uwaterloo.ca/hire/

jasonli• 14 years ago

Definitely visit that link if you're looking to hire Waterloo co-ops. As a Waterloo co-op myself, Jobmine is the most important resource we use to find jobs.

xspectre3• 14 years ago

Check http://communitech.ca which is an organization which supports tech companies in the area.

srlake3• 14 years ago

This is one of the most active sites: http://waterlootechjobs.com/

wmat• 14 years ago

There are two local jobsites:

http://techjobswaterloo.com

http://waterlootechjobs.com

The latter seems to break posting up between StartUp or non StartUp.

melvinng• 14 years ago

Congrats Jinny, Scott and Fravic!!

fwilliams• 14 years ago

Hello Melvin.

supersaiyan4• 14 years ago

Actually facebook has been recruiting a lot too, they had a meetup for facebook interviewees the day before the official interviews, there were 100+ students there, I was really suprised

tetester2• 14 years ago

"Show me the gender distribution of my friends" - 178.72% Male

sgreenlay2• 14 years ago

178 is the number, and 72 is the percentage. Unfortunately the comma is easy to mistake for a period.

tetester2• 14 years ago

I'm the stupid one :(

cbhl6• 14 years ago

Sounds like an i18n nightmare waiting to happen; in some locales, the comma is the period and vice versa.

CoolGuySteve• 14 years ago

Sounds about right for a Waterloo CS student.

guyzero3• 14 years ago

While Waterloo often does seem to be about 178.72% male, parts of engineering are at parity (chem eng was 50/50 a few years back) and there are entire other faculties with lots of lovely people for you to make friends with.

goosling3• 14 years ago

False. There are many women in Waterloo, of which I am one. My chemical engineering class was about 32% female, but many of the programs at Waterloo have more women than male in them.

sliverstorm2• 14 years ago

Who says they weren't just using a 200% scale, like alcohol proof? :)

sgreenlay2• 14 years ago

If you are interested in browsing the source for our hack it is on GitHub: https://github.com/sgreenlay/PYLONS.

ekm2• 14 years ago

U waterloo:Expect my graduate school application in a few weeks time

ptrinh• 14 years ago

In the US, there is Drexel University which also has an awesome co-op program. Many students here had worked in employers like Fb, Google, MS, Amazon, ... and then have fulltime offers.

So if you want to stay in the US and have the co-op, go to Drexel.

abbasmehdi• 14 years ago

Are there details about how others did etc.?

Regards, Bitter UBC grad...

kevhsu• 14 years ago

UIUC was 2nd. I was on this team. We did a Street Fighter browser-based game controlled by webcam. You can play against friends over the internet in realtime.

MIT was 3rd with a chrome extension called "minimap" that allows you to scroll in your browser with smartphone or webcam. Also allows you to have a "minimap" next to your scrollbar that shows a preview of the entire webpage

CMU got an honorable mention for a real time strategy (?) game called "The Hackers" that is based on managing a team for a hackathon.

UBC was there, but I've forgotten what their hack was. Sorry! Was really tired and nervous during demos!

Facebook showed me the time of my life. Eager to apply for a job there...

graeham• 14 years ago

UBC made a "pager" for facebook using a LCD display and controlled by an arduino. We built the hardware, case, and were able to push "pokes", wall posts, and messages to the pager. From the pager, we had two buttons that would push back to either dismiss the message or "like"/poke back.

meangeme2• 14 years ago

Scott talked about the win on CTV National News tonight, you can watch it here! http://www.ctvnews.ca/video?clipId=820148&playlistId=1.1...

University of Waterloo Students Win Facebook's Hackathon

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