University of Waterloo: Silicon Valley's Canadian Feeder School

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-31/university-of-waterloo-silicon-valleys-canadian-feeder-school

by gdilla • 13 years ago

259 153 13 years ago

drpgq2• 13 years ago

Tuition is $12000 now? I graduated from Mac in comp eng in 1996 and I think it was getting to around $3000 then. Definitely worth it, but if you told me at the time I would have thought $12000 was crazy. I graduated with no debt though.

canistr5• 13 years ago

It's roughly $6000/term (for engineering, cheaper for CS students though) not including paying for food + housing (an additional $1600-3000 depending on where you decide to live on or off-campus). I'm in the boat of Waterloo grads who graduated with no debt. But I would hazard a guess that the majority of engineering students have little to no debt. And the students who do co-op in the US most definitely earn more money than what's required to pay for school.

aianus4• 13 years ago

CS with coop is $6300 a term. I think engineering is a few hundred more.

ChronosKey• 13 years ago

I study Software Engineering at Waterloo right now; I paid 7600 this term including tuition, incidental fees, co-op fees, etc. but not including food or residence.

richardlblair4• 13 years ago

If you go to a good school in Ontario you are looking at $7000 at least

roflmfao• 13 years ago

Graduate of Waterloo Software-eng here. I paid back my OSAP all at once right after graduation with money I earned from co-op.

aianus4• 13 years ago

How did you get OSAP while having co-op income? I could take a 30% pay cut and still not qualify for any OSAP.

stickhandle• 13 years ago

Waterloo is a sleepy, postindustrial city of 100,000, a little less than 200 miles northeast of Detroit. Ummm ... Waterloo-Kitchener-Cambridge form the K-W region (these 3 blend together with indistinguishable border) of ~ 1/2 Million peoople. Hardly "sleepy" the region is know as Canada's Tech Triangle and has a vibrant corporate and startup economy. While it is 200 miles northeast of Detroit, it may as well be 2000 ... Detroit has no influence whatsoever. More accurate would be to say it is ~50 miles from Toronto.

guyzero6• 13 years ago

Yes, this is like calling Sunnyvale a sleepy, post-agricultural city of 100,000. It's somewhere between inaccurate and disingenuous.

Apocryphon• 13 years ago

To be fair, all of the Silicon Valley cities, including San Jose itself, are sleepy and post-agricultural. Or at least sluggish and suburban.

rll2• 13 years ago

I did my 5 years at Waterloo (Systems Design Eng) and I wouldn't disagree with the description of Waterloo being sleepy. Especially these days with Blackberry turning many of the areas near the campus into ghost towns.

potatolicious2• 13 years ago

KW, like the rest of the 401 corridor, still has a huge industrial base, much of which is deeply involved with Detroit and the rest of the US manufacturing base.

The postindustrial side of KW may be the what gets all the PR and kudos, but as a whole, in terms of pure economic output and employment, manufacturing is still a substantially greater influence in the region.

richardlblair4• 13 years ago

Common, anyone who has even driven through Waterloo knows it's sleepy... No one says "shit, I really want to go to Waterloo". That's like saying people want to go to London (Ontario)... That's just not a thing

usernew18174• 13 years ago

1/2 million? Waterloo has 100k residents, kitchener has 200k, Cambridge is too far from Waterloo to be counted in that group

malcolmmcc• 13 years ago

"The [Waterloo] Region's population was 507,096 as of the 2011 census."

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo_Region

guyzero6• 13 years ago

Oddly once upon a time (back in '94) we were a feeder for Canadian high-tech and Microsoft, but very few students ended up in the Valley, at least not fresh out of school. In the intervening 20 years Canadian high-tech has stayed flat at best while the US has taken on more and more Waterloo grads every year. The increases in UW engineering & CS enrollment over the past 20 years are basically all going to the US (in my anecdotal opinion).

drpgq2• 13 years ago

As an Ontarian this is a little sad, although I'm sure there's places in the US where the same thing happens. Certainly though I think companies should think of setting up engineering locations in KW. You can get quality people for way less money than you would have to pay in the Valley.

jsnk• 13 years ago

I wish American software giants would open more offices in Canada. Canadian software industry is still in a sorry state right now, but there's a lot talent in the country. American companies can pay lower wage to Canadian devs than US and they will still attract top talents from other Canadian companies because developers are lowballed hard here.

jedberg• 13 years ago

NAFTA. That is what allows US companies to hire Canadian immigrants much easier than from any other country, and so it made it a lot easier for smaller companies (like startups) to actually hire immigrants at all.

toblender3• 13 years ago

Canada still has plenty of talent. U of T has strong CS/Engineering programs. Only a few of my buddies are in the valley.

potatolicious2• 13 years ago

My anecdotal experience is different - almost every software type I went to school with at Waterloo is now in the US somewhere. I know exactly 3 Canadians I went to school with who are still in Canada.

gotrecruit2• 13 years ago

is Waterloo the only university in canada with similar startup culture and recognition from tech companies? i was unfortunately denied admission recently to Waterloo, and I'm planning to try UBC and UToronto. UBC in particular has a special program for people like me - college graduates seeking a second degree in CS, which sounds really good but I keep hearing these things about Waterloo which makes me feel really sad about not making it there.

lcc• 13 years ago

U of T has been getting more attention from tech companies lately - Google, Microsoft, Yelp, Tesla, and Uber (among others) have been recruiting on campus this year. I would say Waterloo has a much stronger startup culture though. Kids at U of T are mostly busy trying to keep their GPAs afloat.

richardlblair4• 13 years ago

Don't take these things too seriously. At the end of the day it's about how good you are. You might have more of a grind to the top, but it's attainable.

toblender3• 13 years ago

I agree, I got rejected from Waterloo as well, but I did fine going to U of T.

parasubvert• 13 years ago

The Waterloo CS co-op program got me down to the Valley in 1998. I wound up dropping out in 2000 to move to New York (I don't recommend this lightly, but it didn't harm my career and likely helped it due to timing).

It was a great program in that it actually tried to teach programming alongside classic CS (this was before the SoftEng degree), and forced you to get out in the real world as soon as possible. The biggest problem was that (due to the grind in years 3 and 4) most of my peers who graduated CS wound up hating computers and couldn't wait to get into management. Also, graduating tends to take 5-6 years due to the work terms. I left in 3B so didn't quite have those scars.

kitcar• 13 years ago

For anyone wanting to hire students from Waterloo / looking for work in the area:

https://uwaterloo.ca/jobmine/employers / https://uwaterloo.ca/hire/

http://waterlootechjobs.com/en/

http://www.techjobswaterloo.com/

http://www.communitech.ca/

prostoalex• 13 years ago

And if you want to have a lengthy conversation with CS majors at Waterloo, bring up Jobmine. Jobmine is healthcare.gov of UW.

pg2• 13 years ago

There is something special about Waterloo. We noticed it a couple years ago.

redthrowaway3• 13 years ago

What's special about UW students/grads, and what do you attribute it to?

dfrey• 13 years ago

It has a reputation for being the best engineering school in Canada, so lots of the best people self-select to go there. Now having said that, I think there is less variability in the quality of education you get between Canadian Universities as compared to US schools. This is mostly based wishy-washy conjecture though.

adamtait3• 13 years ago

I would say that the variability of education quality between Canadian schools isn't that high, but the number of universities isn't great either. Waterloo does try to be more experimental with their curriculum than many other schools, but the real secret is in the co-op/internship program. All Waterloo engineering & (many) computer science students start doing internships in first year and complete 6x 4-month internships before they graduate. This means that you get significant experience before you're cast off on your own, and a chance to test the working conditions at a variety of companies, roles and locations. Graduates are better prepared to hit the ground running once they get their diploma. For hiring companies, they get a low risk 4 month interview. Waterloo also has interns available all year long (not just in the summer months), so they can spread out the minor burden of training an intern. I haven't seen a similar model anywhere else and Waterloo has been doing it for decades.

kohanz3• 13 years ago

It's the co-op program.

Students trade independence during summers for year-round schooling that has them gaining 2 years of work experience at up to 6 different organizations by the time they graduate. And the reputation of the program is such that, if you've got the ability, you'll get opportunities at the biggest tech players. On top of the work experience, you'll have a wealth of experience applying to literally hundreds of jobs, being interviewed, both technically and non-technically, perhaps as many times as you will for the rest of your career, and all of this while working alongside and competing with very bright peers.

randomdata• 13 years ago

In this case, I would attribute it to the province and wise choices with the allocation of government money.

Ontario, the province Waterloo is located in, has historically been pretty good about pushing technology, especially in rural areas. For instance, in the early to mid-nineties the rural public schools local to me had high speed internet connections, while I was reading articles about schools in big city USA that had no access to the internet at all. Today, we have a fibre optic internet connection to the farm, while I read about farms in the US still struggling with dialup connections. Additionally, programming has virtually always been a part of the school curriculum. My father even talks about programming on punch cards in high school. Again, I read about US schools only thinking about introducing this today.

I think that lead to a disproportionate number of young people growing up in the area of Waterloo with a strong technological mindset, due to availability of technology that much of North America did not have easy access to. Then, Waterloo, due to its reputation, gets the best of that bunch.

With all that said, I feel the government has pulled away from a lot of that technology spending in more recent times, so it will be interesting to see if Waterloo can maintain the quality of output for decades to come as the young children today come up through the system.

kcbanner2• 13 years ago

Co-op program.

Pxtl2• 13 years ago

There are solid financial reasons for a Canadian engineering student to want to stay in Canada. With that in mind, some school is going to end up being The Best Tech School In Canada. That's Waterloo.

guyzero6• 13 years ago

Like all great schools what makes the students great is selection bias. Waterloo has a great reputation, so it gets the first pick of the best students. The great graduates give the school a great reputation.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

(Not that I'm complaining as I was part of the system and have benefited greatly from it. Co-op is a very, very big deal. But the professors and the school itself is not appreciably different from U of T or UBC or wherever)

chollida12• 13 years ago

I think its a bit more than this though.

Their co-op program was, and continues to be, pretty awesome. This, IMHO, is what first got the great students to go there.

With university cost only increasing its nice to know you'll be able to pay your way due to co-op.

mathattack3• 13 years ago

There is a positive cycle that happens, no doubt, but I think it's more than this. McGill also gets great students, but my experience with Waterloo alums has been better.

pg2• 13 years ago

It's not just how good they are. They have a different attitude from students from elite US universities. More practical, less arrogant. I'm not sure whether it's a Canadian thing or a Waterloo thing though.

chunky1994• 13 years ago

I too think it's a bit more. Speaking as a physics major in co-op, the co-op program has taught me (and I'm sure will continue to do so) a great deal in terms of entrepreneurship as well as software. It's taught me a lot of things I wouldn't know about running a company had I not actually been in one/heard people who've started one talking about it.

Combined with the people who are here, waterloo is dripping with a sense of vigour that if you go looking for it will send you to great heights.

Think about it this way: Your buddies are starting companies, earning many thousands of dollars and changing the world in important areas; are you simply going to sit around and graduate? I think not.

chollida12• 13 years ago

Microsoft has been onto this for a very long time. Even back in the early 90's they'd hire huge numbers of co-ops and graduating students each year.

mathattack3• 13 years ago

We used to recruit there for my prior employer. Everyone thought it was because one of the big bosses got his engineering degree there. Then we found the folks were just as talented as their ivy league peers, and very honeset, down to earth, and willing to work hard too.

pokoleo2• 13 years ago

Cribbed from a recent Quora answer of mine:

The Waterloo (CS/Eng) intern ecosystem is immensely strong. First year students generally work at the best companies that they can, often taking smaller startups where they are able to learn the most. There's a steady transition to final co-op terms, where most classmates end up working in Silicon Valley, Redmond, NYC, and their own startups. It's a great place to be if you want to be part of the brain drain.

Like many well-known American business schools, UW has the fortune of having graduates opting to return term-after-term to hire interns. Since UW interns are full-year round, this creates a dependency of companies to hire interns (compensation is less than full-time employees, but it's still nice).

While I understand that other schools may have 'almost' co-op programs, Waterloo's is the largest one in the continent (and perhaps the world too). By having multiple exposures to different employers, the school provides successful students the ability to quickly ascend the ranks of the corporate ladder while receiving academic instruction on how to be better at their jobs.

I understand a common problem at other universities is that courses are not always relevant to the real world. By placing students constantly in contact with production code, there is a strong backlash against badly taught and irrelevant course material. Waterloo is grounded in the real-world, as I think most of us live in it.

My only complaint is the geese and the timezone. I'd prefer to be on the west coast, but Waterloo is home (until Winter term).

seanmcdirmid2• 13 years ago

The other more famous UW also does this: Google has a habit of hiring lots of UW graduates (see Jeff Dean), who then go on to hire other UW graduates...and also a very good co-op program with many willing local companies (most notably, Microsoft, but also Intel in Portland).

dclusin• 13 years ago

RIT has a pretty good coop program as well.

scosman• 13 years ago

"Most years, we hire more students out of Waterloo than any university in the world" -Bill Gates

I think we topped Google one year too, but couldn't find a source.

DrewAllyn• 13 years ago

We tend to trade back and forth with Stanford for top at Apple too.

caval• 13 years ago

If you are a tech/software company you should definitely consider taking on Waterloo co-ops. There is a lot of competition between the students to get the best jobs. This results in students that go above and beyond in their work to distinguish themselves for the next round of interviews for their next co-op job. On top of that, having this kind of ambition on your team can rub off on the rest of the team boost the teams productivity.

gjmulhol• 13 years ago

No mention of Chamath Palihapitiya or Eric Migicovsky. I think the title and intent of this article are spot on, but like so many things Business Week, the reporting doesn't hit the important datapoints. Why focus on BlackBerry, which certainly deserves mention, but totally ignore two huge successes that support the thesis of the article.

acchow• 13 years ago

Business Week isn't real journalism. No surprise here.

Oculus• 13 years ago

Does anyone know if companies view soft-eng grads vs. compsci grads from uw differently? The school says it's the same, but I'm hoping to hear some first hand experience. Asking as a prospective undergrad next year :)

rohitv2• 13 years ago

Software jobs are usually categorized with soft-eng, compsci, comp and/or elec eng and sometimes even other engineering disciplines. So they most probably don't view them differently. It really depends on the candidate and their capabilities. I have worked at places where the previous coop students were in compsci whereas I am a compeng student. For most of my interviews so far, the other candidates have been from softeng/compsci/ece. Answering as a second year undergrad :)

cbhl2• 13 years ago

If you want to write nuclear shutdown routines for AEAC, or work on something else safety critical in Canada, there may be a difference. (Strictly speaking, you can get your P. Eng by doing CS, if you take the right set of courses, but nobody in their right mind would subject themselves to this.)

If you want to work on something relatively harmless (buttons on a web page) then it won't matter.

reso• 13 years ago

Having done > 70 interviews in my time at UW, most companies don't understand or care about the difference between Soft-eng and CS programs. I'd highly recommend CS over Soft-eng, unless you like pain.

DrSbaitso• 13 years ago

That may be true, but for a Canadian a big advantage of taking software engineering is that it makes it much easier to work in the US later. An engineering degree lets you easily qualify for the "engineer" category of the TN visa, but with a CS degree it's considerably harder.

hoverkraft• 13 years ago

Currently working with a Waterloo intern and I can personally attest that he is the bomb.

adamtait3• 13 years ago

I'm very proud of my time at Waterloo. The school surrounded me great students and (some) great professors who were constantly challenging and rewarding. I wouldn't be the person I am now, and wouldn't have had the same great opportunities had I gone to another school.

As always, these stories about 'Canada's hidden talent pool' slide into a discussion about the 'brain drain'. Many of classmates from the class '07 ended up in the bay area, Seattle/Redmond, NYC or Boston. I'd estimate greater than 50%. In fact, I'm one of them. While I may not be living in Canada, I still stay connected to my home. I have many friends who have moved to the US after school only to return to Canada when they're ready to settle down and have a family. Canada remains a great place to live; I just wish we could decrease the cost of doing business between Canada & the US lower, and convince more Americans to move up north.

pyrocat• 13 years ago

Isn't it pretty hard to get Canadian citizenship if you're American? Like, even with highly sought after skills in tech I've heard it's near impossible.

auctiontheory• 13 years ago

Among the "rich" countries, Canada is one of the most open in the world to skilled immigrants.

guyzero6• 13 years ago

What? No.

bzmwillemsen• 13 years ago

It's not hard at all to become a Canadian citizen.

You can even move here to start a startup on our "start up visa program" http://www.cic.gc.ca/ENGLISH/immigrate/business/start-up/ind... Then work your way towards citizenship.

richardlblair4• 13 years ago

Waterloo is really great at making it easy to hire co-ops. This is a huge part of its success. I've heard hiring managers say they prefer UW students over other schools simply because the co-op process at UW is so easy for them.

patman_h• 13 years ago

I'm not sure to what extent hiring managers have to interact with the software that powers the co-op process (Jobmine), but as a student who has used it to secure 5 terms of work, Jobmine is definitely up there on my list of the worst designed/most frustrating pieces of software to use. Jobs for CS students are good and plentiful, so its still worth sludging through the system. Looking forward to the replacement, if it ever comes (startup idea?)! (http://www.bulletin.uwaterloo.ca/2011/feb/25fr.html)

canistr5• 13 years ago

For students it's easy to criticize Jobmine as users of it. But given the even worse (or in many cases, non-existent) co-op application systems at other schools, Jobmine is light years better.

I remember working with some Waterloo alumni from the 80s/90s and they spoke of the chaos of the application and ranking process when everything was done on paper. I personally can't even fanthom how UW managed to do any of this (although obviously there were less than half the number of students then to what we have today).

vation2• 13 years ago

WaterlooWorks is set to be available for Arch students Spring 2014, with a full release in Winter 2015 I believe.

kohanz3• 13 years ago

The funny thing is, at least when I attended UW (early 2000's), is that its domestic profile was not as strong as its recognition in the US would suggest. Many Canadians would mention more established schools such as U of T and Queens before Waterloo.

However, when I went for my first internship in California (NVIDIA, with about 20 fellow UW students), I found out that most people there couldn't name a single Canadian school, but if they could, it was UW.

I also remember a poker dealer in Vegas seeing my friend's iron ring and guessing "Waterloo?".

solox3• 13 years ago

According to Google's top hit, Waterloo also happens to be "the top poker university": www.pokerlistings.com/blog/top-5-poker-universities

paulgb3• 13 years ago

One alumnus the university tends not to brag about is Calvin Ayre, founder of the bodog online poker empire.

paulgb3• 13 years ago

My experience (late 2007-2012) echoed yours. I'd meet people from Western Canada who hadn't heard of Waterloo, but anyone who'd been in the valley for a while would have a story about someone they'd worked with from Waterloo or how much they like hiring newgrads.

Pxtl2• 13 years ago

Depends on the field. You talk to geeks, they list Waterloo and UofT. You talk to scientists, they list McMaster and UofT. You talk to teachers, they list Brock and UofT. And so on.

stan_rogers• 13 years ago

Funny... it was the place for math and CS (in both the math and engineering schools) in the '70s. Hell, you'd have to have been blind to miss the Waterloo-sponsored math contests in high school (only the Society of Actuaries sponsored any other HS contests in those days, and that one was only for Grade 13 students in Ontario). If you did math or wanted to get into the computer world, you wanted to go to Waterloo, the same way that engineers wanted to go to Queens. I find it rather hard to believe that UW fell off of the map in the intervening period.

memracom2• 13 years ago

Former Waterloo student here...

It's a shame that more Waterloo folks don't stay in Canada and build their businesses here. Unlike when I was at UW, nowadays there is plenty of investment money available in Canada and significant tech hubs in Vancouver, Toronto and Waterloo itself. Not to mention the fact that even in less major Canadian cities (or the US Midwest) there actually is a tech scene happening and people are starting new businesses. It is no longer necessary to move far from home to build a tech business.

paulgb3• 13 years ago

Actually, the article doesn't spin it that way, but a lot are staying in the Waterloo area. BufferBox for the most part is still based in KW. Thalmic and Vidyard returned to KW after YC. Eric is one of the few successful exceptions I can think of for staying in PA with Pebble after YC.

throwaway1979• 13 years ago

Every time I've looked into it in detail, I feel Canada's VCs/angels are essentially bankers. Too much risk minimization going on (at the expense of the entrepreneur). What I find is a travesty is that the recent govt of Canada investment in developing startup activity will most likely go to these glorified bankers to help them further reduce risk.

Look at how much YC has spent on its startups ... my memory might be faulty but when I heard pg give the number it was around 6 million. If the govt of Canada did a program similar to startup Chile where they would invest in people's startups for a few months, THAT would have been a game changer for the smart Waterloo and UofT grads. Squandered opportunities ...

usernew18174• 13 years ago

this is very true, very low valuation, a friends company got into an incubator, a very well known incubator in SV, and their current investor called them retards because the valuations wasn't proportionate to revenue...

redthrowaway3• 13 years ago

You're right on the money. Bay St likes resources, not startups. The company I'm currently working for was started by a couple of fresh UVic grads in 2005 and they went through 60 VCs before they found one who both had a worthwhile network, and seemed legitimately interested in funding a startup that had positive cashflow from day 1 and partnerships with tech titans.

usernew18174• 13 years ago

Man its depressing, its been a year post graduation and all my friends have moved to Silicon Valley, I'm working on a start up so I stayed, but its really hard when literally every technical person you used to chill with has moved out.

brandonb• 13 years ago

The Waterloo students I've worked with have been absolutely amazing and have tons of programming experience. They do co-ops year-round. If you're running a startup, I'd recommend putting a post on Jobmine, which is their online job matching tool: http://uwaterloo.ca/jobmine/

The next deadline to post a co-op is January 15, for students working in summer 2014.

(You can technically post now for the "continuous cycle" of Jan-Apr co-ops, but I think most students are already matched so you'll get fewer results.)

abali• 13 years ago

Waterloo's rep really hit home to me when at the end of our YC interview, PG still hadn't seen our demo and when we asked why, he said, "You're from Waterloo right? It works."

zeruch• 13 years ago

We have been using co-ops from Waterloo for some time and have subsequently hired several full time. Some greta people there (even if they eat that weird abomination, Poutine)

bct• 13 years ago

In my experience Canadians don't perceive the same differences between universities that Americans do.

Fewer differences between our universities is a plausible explanation. So is the possibility that Americans perceive differences that don't exist.

resu• 13 years ago

I find it very strange that they picked BufferBox instead of Thalmic Labs.

kcbanner2• 13 years ago

Why?

ryguytilidie• 13 years ago

Pretty simple really.

They throw their students into the deep end and have them do multiple internships versus my public school in CA where I was the exception to the norm for doing an internship at all.

These people come out of school with the abilities of someone 2 years out of school but with the same freshness and excitement of other new grads.

borisjabes• 13 years ago

This is something big tech companies have known since the dot-com era (Amazon & Microsoft have been recruiting from Waterloo heavily for over a decade).

rohitv2• 13 years ago

Being an engineering student at University of Waterloo has been a great experience so far. Co-op is one of the main reasons why I chose UW as it is certainly rewarding. The knowledge and experience that I have gained through 1.5 coop terms (currently on co-op) has been simply amazing. It also helps pay the tuition and reduce, if not completely take away, the debt after graduation. Besides the university, the Kitchener-Waterloo region is a great place to be in for technology and start up enthusiasts. The R&T park right beside the university and the Tannery Complex in Kitchener are home to many great companies/startups. It is compelling to overhear conversations about reversing linked lists,javascript mvc/mv* frameworks, monetizing apps while eating at a local restaurant. Having 2 years of experience at possibly 6 different companies helps stand out from graduates from other universities.

leot• 13 years ago

More evidence for Waterloo's "specialness" can be found here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lowell_Putnam_Mathemat...

Its teams have finished among the top five 18 times since 1968, twice as many times as Stanford (though far fewer times than MIT, Princeton, or Harvard). This with a budget that's dwarfed by the schools who dominate the competition (and can afford expensive international recruitment). Waterloo had its heyday, interestingly enough, around the time that RIM was founded: beginning in 1978 it placed in the top five eleven of the following sixteen years.

yureka• 13 years ago

Another is the schools consistently high placement in the ACM's ICPC:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACM_International_Collegiate_P...

niuzeta2• 13 years ago

As far as I remember UW is one of the only universities in the continent to offer a course to build an actual real-time operating system, from the ground up. I learned so much in that course. Co-ops rule, but for non-coops the so-called "big three" courses are pretty famous as well. I've had countless interviews where an interviewer asked me if I'd taken at least one of the three courses.

amackera• 13 years ago

I took the Comp Eng version of that course (in contrast from the SE/CS version which is less hardcore IMO).

That course taught me how to make software.

mingfli• 13 years ago

Plus you got to play with trains.

usernew18174• 13 years ago

when they're actually working...

tezka• 13 years ago

"Please refrain from feeding RT students. We are NOT monkeys." The sign on the real-time lab's window used to read.

BenoitEssiambre• 13 years ago

This is anecdotal but one of their students once told me that Waterloo puts more emphasis on mathematics compared to other universities. It's not that students there necessarily take more math courses but that most courses try to integrate math and teach the mathematical aspects of their material, even courses outside of science. Their wikipedia page states that "Waterloo created the first Faculty of Mathematics in North America" so I guess it's a tradition for them.

haydentay• 13 years ago

I went to Waterloo as a Psychology major and I would say that is true. That mathematical attitude does seep into a lot of of the culture and programs. Talking to other psychology grads, the program at Waterloo had significantly more emphasis on stats and analysis.

jrsmitchell• 13 years ago

Waterloo does have a strong Math tradition. But further to that, for a long time the Computer Science degree at Waterloo was a specialization under their Bachelor of Mathematics degree. So you had to fulfill all of the requirements of the Math program and graduated with a "BMath". You were also offered interesting minors like "Combinatorics and Optimization" where you would get deep into Cryptography, Graph Theory and so on.

I can't say how it compares to other schools, but certainly many of my memories of CS at Waterloo were working feverishly through difficult math assignments so I could get back to the lab. ;)

stox• 13 years ago

UW has had a great CompSci program for decades. WATFOR has celebrated it's 50th anniversary.

CurtMonash• 13 years ago

It goes all the way back to Watcom Fortran.

That eventually got absorbed into Powersoft, which was bought by Sybase, with the star being the DBMS that turned into SQL Anywhere, which became the ostensible reason for SAP's acquisition of Sybase.

(That story is of course oversimplified ...)

University of Waterloo: Silicon Valley's Canadian Feeder School

Related Stories