The Cost of Waterloo Software Engineering

http://blog.petersobot.com/the-cost-of-waterloo-software-engineering

by psobot • 12 years ago

95 60 12 years ago

blog.petersobot.com

    After 5 long and difficult years,
    I’m extremely proud to say that
    I’m a Waterloo grad

Every Waterloo grad I've ever met has gone through their coop program, which adds an extra year to their undergrad degree: https://uwaterloo.ca/find-out-more/co-op/how-co-op-works

philip1209• 12 years ago

I'll add that their starting salaries reflect this, though.

ska4• 12 years ago

If I recall correctly it is required for all engineering degrees, and quite popular in programs like CS as well.

From the hiring end, it works well. These graduates are typically very competent.

jagger27• 12 years ago

It makes me a little jealous as a Carleton student.

ChrisArchitect• 12 years ago

legendary coop program, good placements, defacto part of being waterloo eng/CS student.

Carleton has coop for sure, just not nearly as strong. But back in the dotcom boom/silicon valley north/nortel era of late 90s/early 2000's...it was good because the region was super strong.

seren2• 12 years ago

It might be obvious to American readers, but I had not idea that University of Waterloo mentioned here was in Canada, and not in Belgium.

recalibrator• 12 years ago

Yes, in Ontario Canada. It's home of BlackBerry (the smartphones company) and a hotbed for startups. Google has an office downtown in downtown Waterloo.

jacobparker• 12 years ago

It is in downtown Kitchener; the city beside Waterloo. (That doesn't change the semantics, here.)

(Waterloo's downtown is branded "uptown". Urg.)

hackerboos• 12 years ago

Or a district in Liverpool, a train station in London or a song by Abba.

Terr_• 12 years ago

Dang, I was honestly expecting a Napoleonic analogy for software-design / project-management

seren2• 12 years ago

I was also expecting some death march story. Interesting nonetheless.

1971genocide5• 12 years ago

I find HN fetish with UoW to be interesting , which has been my data point to be very skeptical about believing everything I read here.

1) UoW has a really low requirement for entry, of my class many students went to study at UoW most of them had average to below average grade, compared to Oxbridge UoW has a joke of an entry requirement, I later learned they have a very high dropout rate after first year - which explains things, but I think is disingenuous to their students. School should be a place of learning not a lab for natural selection.

2) I drew a spreadsheet for Unis across the global all from singapore,UK,US and Canada. Any engineer graduating with an average GPA working full time for 1 year and having done internships in uni will have earned more money than what this links shows.

3) The strong internship requirement means students who cannot find one within four months of joining uni is likely to fail his semester even if he is academically gifted. My UoW friend failed a year due to this stupid requirement, in most other universities it will not be an end to your stay if you fail to get a job within the first 4 months.

4) UoW has really bad reputation in the academical world and ppl doing basic research ( look up UoW ranking )

5) Their fees are only competitive if you are from canada, they are much more expensive for international students compared to elite universities in the UK.

6) Universities historically should have weak ties with industries. The reason for this is independence. I know for a fact that UoW has strong ties with microsoft in the past and used to push .NET stuff on their students ! how do you expect a university to be intellectually honest if they are attached to a corporation ?

I could add more but I am running out of time.

jarek4• 12 years ago

Waterloo's technical programs would be at home at a very strong polytechnic. It's not Oxbridge and never will be. "University" is a misnomer but English-speaking Canada doesn't use "technical university" or "polytechnic" and "college" means something else.

Weak ties with industries are important for theoretical research but a joke for programs like mechanical engineering.

1971genocide5• 12 years ago

As far as I see it waterloo doesn't advertise itself as a polytechnic, however it might be a fault of their marketing department.

I do not think I am mistaken with their intentions, why doesn't UoW charge similar rates (fees) as other polytech rather than charging the rates of MIT/Oxbridge ? They offer 4 years bachelors degree similar to the ones offered by any other top universities.

I disagree that mechanical engineering should be put in the same ranks as electricians/auto-mechanics.

leothekim• 12 years ago

I don't think someone enters a co-op program to become an academic. If you come to it from that angle, then yeah there are a lot of things that you can be skeptical about.

My experience with UoW grads is relatively limited, but I have to say they are among the most battle-tested engineers to come out of university that I've worked with. A few I've known personally are much savvier than engineers many years their senior. Whatever you say have to say about the co-op program, it really gears the students to become strong software engineers in the industry.

nhaehnle• 12 years ago

4) UoW has really bad reputation in the academical world and ppl doing basic research

Not being related to Waterloo in any way I have no skin in the game, but their combinatorial optimization department (which is part of mathematics) is very strong.

I guess this just goes to show that you cannot reliably evaluate a university as a whole.

1971genocide5• 12 years ago

yeah, I wanted to study their discrete optimization course but realized It might be too risky to specialize in your undergrad.

I also agree its hard to gauge a university with just one metric.

potatolicious5• 12 years ago

"3) The strong internship requirement means students who cannot find one within four months of joining uni is likely to fail his semester even if he is academically gifted."

This is unequivocally false. You seem to be very confused about how UW co-op works.

Firstly, since you seem to be going at this from a CS academic angle - CS students are not required to join co-op, and can get a traditional 4-year CS degree without finding a single internship, ever.

Only engineering disciplines are required to join co-op, and for good reason - traditional engineering (mechanical, electrical, chemical, etc) have academia and industry practically fused at the hips. An engineering education without industry experience frankly doesn't make sense.

More than that though, a UW co-op student has 6 internship semesters in their degree program, out of which the student must be employed for 5 of them. This means all students get a "freebie" if they don't have an internship - whether voluntarily or involuntarily.

There is no scenario under which a student will fail "within four months of joining uni" - absolute worst case scenario they spend their freebie term.

For CS students the absolutes worst case if you are unable to find internships repeatedly is leaving the co-op program, and losing nothing academically.

"My UoW friend failed a year due to this stupid requirement, in most other universities it will not be an end to your stay if you fail to get a job within the first 4 months."

I suspect there's more to your friend's story than you know. At UW it is most certainly not the end of your stay if you fail to get a job for your 1A term in Stream 4/4S (i.e., within the first 4 months).

1971genocide5• 12 years ago

My friend is studying mechatronics in waterloo. In the link and also my friend told me that they attach university credit for your co-op. My friend wasn't able to gain employment within 4 months of joining uni and also failed to gain one in the next semester ( even though he did relatively well on his exams ). So he didn't have enough credit to move on to the next year. The fact they attach such an arbitrary requirement to your academics is what causes me concern.

ska4• 12 years ago

You have a strange idea of what "really bad" reputation means.

That university certainly isn't a peer to Oxbridge, as you note. But like many research universities that aren't in the top handful, a big part of the reason is inconsistency. They have departments with a very high reputation internationally, and they have departments that are decidedly mediocre.

I suspect the reason this school shows up often on HN is because as far as I can tell the (engineering/CS) programs are consistently appreciated by industry. Very few schools have the reputation of producing graduates who fairly reliable do very well in industry, and can hit the ground running. This seems to be one of them.

TeMPOraL• 12 years ago

(...) compared to Oxbridge UoW has a joke of an entry requirement, I later learned they have a very high dropout rate after first year - which explains things, but I think is disingenuous to their students. School should be a place of learning not a lab for natural selection.

I don't know if this is how things work in the US, but in Poland we have the same phenomenon at our best universities. The cause of it here is that university gets paid for every student they take in, so they often offer twice as many places as they have capacity to handle, and drop half of the students after first year.

stan_rogers• 12 years ago

With Waterloo, it's more a matter of the school recognizing that the people who will do well in their "prestige" programs (mathematics and computer science, in particular) are not necessarily the same people who excel in getting secondary school marks. I know that my marks (apart from mathematics and sciences) would have precluded me from, say, advanced janitorial training at any respectable institution, but between the math marks (and the contest scores - Waterloo develops and sponsors a number of math contests for Ontario secondary school students), getting accepted to Waterloo's Mathematics Department wasn't a problem (ugh - almost forty years ago now, when co-op was optional and new), where Laurentian was. (For anyone interested, Laurentian University was known for nursing and a unique sports administration program that combined a BComm with athletics, kinesiology and a few other sports-related disciplines. Apart from that, it was known as "the university that had to let you in when nobody else would". It wouldn't let me in.)

ap22213• 12 years ago

I have had a positive view of UoW after competing with them in the ACM competitions during the 90s. Their teams were pretty impressive. But as you imply, that may not have been representative of the whole school population. Also, their team fielded a lot of grad students, whereas a lot of other universities (like mine) only had undergrads.

alanctgardner32• 12 years ago

Frankly, Canada has a fetish for Waterloo. I think you have some misconceptions though: their placement rate for co-ops is like 98%. Students aren't dropping out because they can't find a position, although they are forced to travel for their placements in some cases. Most of the students I know who selected UW wanted to end up at a Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, or start a company - academia is definitely not the emphasis, and I think students know that going in.

aianus2• 12 years ago

UoW has a really low requirement for entry, of my class many students went to study at UoW most of them had average to below average grade, compared to Oxbridge UoW has a joke of an entry requirement, I later learned they have a very high dropout rate after first year - which explains things, but I think is disingenuous to their students. School should be a place of learning not a lab for natural selection.

I like it much better this way. Proving you can handle university by actually handling it is better and more fair than having admissions guess based on proxies like extracurriculars, personal essays, and easily gamed high school grades.

Edit: grammar

cldellow• 12 years ago

It's also worth clarifying that while Waterloo has a low _hard_ cut off, it still tends to take academically qualified students. e.g. for engineering 2012, 66% of students had averages over 90% and the average ... average was 91% [1].

As for attrition, [2] states that 90.8% of first year students advance to second year, and 88.6% of admitted engineers complete a degree (but perhaps critically, not an engineering degree). There are a lot of valid criticisms of Waterloo, but I'm not sure that low admission standards and high attrition are among them.

[1] https://uwaterloo.ca/institutional-analysis-planning/univers...

[2] https://uwaterloo.ca/institutional-analysis-planning/univers...

zenbowman• 12 years ago

If you are going for an undergraduate degree, a bad academic reputation due to lack of research emphasis is a plus. Research universities do not care about undergraduates, and professors in research universities tend not to even like teaching (with some exceptions).

Ties to industry are perfectly fine in the applied fields, where students are undertaking a degree for the purpose of becoming professionals at a particular occupation. It would be more of a concern in a pure science field.

michaelmior• 12 years ago

A bad academic reputation is not really a plus, but fortunately this really isn't true at Waterloo. At minimum, it depends on what your goals are after graduation. For those wishing to continue on in academia, high quality research is a nice bonus. There are plenty of opportunties for undergrads to get involved in research, and even have this be part of the internship progream.

Even for those who don't, high quality research tends to attract high quality professors. It's true that some of these professors dislike teaching, but I think there are enough who do to make up for it.

Disclaimer: I'm a PhD student at UoW

peeters2• 12 years ago

1) UoW has a really low requirement for entry, of my class many students went to study at UoW most of them had average to below average grade

What programs are you talking about? UW (it's not UoW) isn't necessarily a top-of-the-line school in every department--like most schools in Ontario it has a broad offering of programs--but when I was in the SE program (which is being discussed in the article) the cut-off HS average was mid nineties (around 92-95%), and was easily among the hardest programs to get into in Ontario.

I believe they are more lenient on foreign students though, because they bring in way more money.

JOnAgain• 12 years ago

> I find HN fetish with UoW to be interesting

You would be surprised how much Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. recruit Waterloo grads. A Waterloo undergrad in Computer Science or Software Engineering is definitely competitive with the best schools in the world.

(Not discounting other majors, but HN tends to be more focused on computer stuff.)

mahyarm• 12 years ago

It's Canada's strongest engineering university, which means for most Canadians on a cost/benefit basis it's the best place to go to. That combined with the relatively larger amount of Canadians inside SV is enough. For the average american, there is no point to going to oxbridge since local american universities are more compelling, unless it's much cheaper.

physPop• 12 years ago

I am critical of your arguments for many reasons. They are not well reasoned, poorly communicated, and predicated on an "anti-fetish" as you so eloquently put it.

1) False. Go look it up. 2) The site doesn't include a year of work post graduation. This is a bad comparison. 3) False. I believe their placement rate is ~98% or so, check their website. Also, never cite "I know a friend...", anecdotal evidence is almost worse than no evidence. 4) False. Rankings are a bad metric to assess research prominence, as research quality varies markedly across departments. Additionally, research prowess is likely diametrically opposed to the goals of a student seeking an undergrad education in a co-op focused program. 5) Yup. Still a deal for internationals though. 6) Wholesomeness of research ideals aside, industry funding is key for applied research. The government is certainly not going to fund compiler research, or work on applied group theory. I suggest you reconsider this idealism. We have rules that all donations and research grants need to be reported, so you can look this up. All large universities in north america with good research programs in engineering typically have strong funding from large corporations.

That being said, I am in no way affiliated with UW, other than being an academic, and knowing well about their excellent reputation in research and in placement rates for their math/cs/eng undergrads. Many large firms recruit from the Woo that do not in fact recruit from pretentious British schools.

Why? Simple: It is well known that the 'elite' universities suffer from drastic grade inflation. Strong co-op programs provide employers with significant extra data about potential employees. What kind of projects did they work on? What are their work reviews like? Grades and university ranking/brand are nearly meaningless these days -- see pg's excellent essay on this topic.

mathattack• 12 years ago

I find much to disagree with here. My sample size (5 or 6?) is small, but I've found the Waterloo folks to be solid.

Just to touch on some comments:

1) UoW has a really low requirement for entry, of my class many students went to study at UoW most of them had average to below average grade, compared to Oxbridge UoW has a joke of an entry requirement, I later learned they have a very high dropout rate after first year - which explains things, but I think is disingenuous to their students. School should be a place of learning not a lab for natural selection.

Getting solid results with weak students makes this all the more impressive.

4) UoW has really bad reputation in the academical world and ppl doing basic research ( look up UoW ranking )

This is very elitist. Not everyone needs to graduate from a top tier research institution. Many top liberal arts colleges are weak in research too.

6) Universities historically should have weak ties with industries. The reason for this is independence. I know for a fact that UoW has strong ties with microsoft in the past and used to push .NET stuff on their students ! how do you expect a university to be intellectually honest if they are attached to a corporation ?

Most professional schools have strong ties with industry. Any senior partner at McKinsey (or Goldman) can get a meeting with the dean of any business school in America. This is a technical program, not philosophy or art history. Most engineering students welcome industry ties, and the job prospects that come with it.

danudey• 12 years ago

UoW has a really low requirement for entry, of my class many students went to study at UoW most of them had average to below average grade, compared to Oxbridge UoW has a joke of an entry requirement, I later learned they have a very high dropout rate after first year - which explains things, but I think is disingenuous to their students. School should be a place of learning not a lab for natural selection.

You're conflating two different issues: first, that UoW has low entry requirements, and second, that they have a high first-year dropout rate. These are not necessarily related.

I've had friends who went into computer science at other universities, and their frustration was palpable. Even in third year, most of the students there were mostly incapable of doing real work on their own. Many didn't program before they went into university, they didn't program in their spare time, and they weren't going to be any good whatsoever once they had their degree.

There were, however, some students that excelled. They had been programming for most of their lives, they understood how computers worked, and they had a passion for the craft.

The UoW dropouts are most likely the first category, and not the second, but the flaw in your argument is assuming that the first category is made of students who are only in the program because of the low requirements. In my general experience, good grades (even in your computer science courses!) does not necessarily equate with practical programming skill. What equate with skill is passion.

Lower entry requirements provides the opportunity to filter their graduates based on aptitude for programming and concepts, interest in the work, and capability for completing tasks, rather than 'I got a 98% in math in grade 12', and that's part of what makes UoW great: the quality of their students. We pull dozens of co-ops from UoW every year, our founders and a significant number of our employees graduated from UoW, and the people that we get are serious, top-tier talent capable of doing some amazing work.

I won't bother speaking to the rest of your points, as this is the one that struck me as the most closed-minded of them all. The rest seem pretty terrible as well, but I sadly don't have time to argue them.

dkhenry3• 12 years ago

Drexel University has a similar program requiring five years to complete. However the co-op's are for six months at a time which is infinitely more useful to both the student and employer then more frequent shorter co-op's.

peeters2• 12 years ago

There's always a balance to be struck. Very often, students will do 2-6 terms in the same place. The difference is that the part that exceeds 4 months only happens if it's a good fit for both student and employer.

Compare that to some places that do an entire 16 month co-op at once in the middle of your program (e.g. McMaster). I've heard horror stories of people knowing in the first 3 weeks that they were going to hate working there, but were basically obligated to work there for another 15 months to get credit. You can put up with almost anything for 4 months.

That, and it's much easier to schedule classes to be shared by non-coop students and coop students when the terms align (non-coop do 8 months school, 4 months summer, etc).

aianus2• 12 years ago

How does that work given that standard school terms are 4 months long and the lcm of 6 and 4 is 12? You'd have to bunch up consecutive co-ops or else have dead time to resync with the rest of the school.

Edit: fail math x2

dkhenry3• 12 years ago

At Drexel the school terms are three months. So each co-op is two terms. The normal cycle is two three month school terms one six month co-op.

boyaka• 12 years ago

University of the Pacific had the six month co-op 5 year program as well (was required in my time but I believe there are some alternatives these days). My manager in my first internship would actually hire from our school and Waterloo, normally 3 from Waterloo and 2 from our school. He made an exception the year I went and we ended up with just 1 Waterloo and 4 from my school...thankfully for me!

I became good friends with the Waterloo student working in our department. The interns throughout the company (a few other Waterloo students, some other schools too) would hang out together at lunch every day. Another Waterloo student rotated in while we were there as well. The four of us from my school lived in an apartment in the same complex as the Waterloo student, who had three Waterloo roommates working at different companies. We got together for quite a few activities and dinners outside of work and got to hear stories from their friends about the other companies they were working at.

I agree that six months is a lot better to really get involved in the work and accomplish something, but the short duration internships certainly kept them on their toes. Also, as stated elsewhere in this thread, they do have the ability to double up their time at one of their positions. I was pretty envious of the huge amount of connections they have and the fast, relentless pace of their program, but not so much of the fact that they have no breaks!

cabinpark• 12 years ago

And that's why they have 8 month co-ops in addition to 4 month co-ops.

dkhenry3• 12 years ago

That makes much more sense. Expecially if you can do a four month stint and then extend it. Then your not stuck at a bad job or you can really get involved and learn.

Pxtl• 12 years ago

I went through an EE co-op in UofGuelph, another university in the area. It was harder to get positions without the local prestige of the Waterloo brand, but it was still a great experience that convinced me that I liked software more than hardware.

why-el• 12 years ago

I can testify that this (systematically alternating between school and work throughout your undergraduate studies) makes you a better engineer. I learned about it when I moved to Germany, and it shows in some of my colleagues who chose to do it.

This is not an option in a lot of countries, including my own (Morocco). The closest thing to this system that I did was to convince my computer science department to let me take a long pause from school (January to September) and move to Brazil where I found a good tech company that paid me for my ridiculously long internship. I came back with a very clear idea of my strengths and weaknesses when working on large and critical software systems, and I designed my last semester around these new insights.

Granted, most people achieve similar goals through traditional internships routes, but it helps to be able to see you work live on beyond summer and be able to identify medium term regressions, follow on on other use cases, and account for the fact that other people will be taking up the torch soon.

neilxm• 12 years ago

The Case for and against U Waterloo

I did my undergrad as well as my master's in Mechatronics at UWaterloo. Thought I'd pitch in to shed some light on two of the key themes of this conversation, Co-op and Academic research.

1. Co-op - The Waterloo 4 month alternating Co-op program has its pros and cons. On one hand you get the chance to go out and sample a bunch of different kinds of jobs (if you proactively choose to do so), travel, fund your own education without drowning in student loans and get a taste for what engineering outside the classroom might be like. Currently with a large number of start-ups in Waterloo a lot of Co-op students work with start-ups which, for this forum, should undoubtedly be a good thing.

On the other hand, the obsession with co-op chips away from the culture of learning that a University should harbor. I remember freaking out about jobs, interviews and my resume from the 3rd week of classes in first year. It seems to be a common theme here. You spend most of your actual time on campus, preparing to get off campus and it creates less of an impetus to pursue deeper learning and research. That being said, as with everything in life, you get out of it what you put into it.

2. Academic Research -

Most schools, In my opinion, have good pockets and bad pockets. The fact that the model of scientific research worldwide is pretty broken is well known. Industrial partnerships drive research because that's where the money is. At least until we all become millionaires and donate money back to our Universities for no-strings-attached research :D It also depends on the professor. Some professors choose to fund themselves off government grants that give them less money and more freedom while others choose to work with large companies like GM on industrial research projects. You need to find the professor that aligns with your interests. I was lucky enough to work on robotic path planning and multi-robot cooperation without any industrial interests breathing down my neck but that doesn't always happen of course.

The good thing about a Waterloo master's is that it is guaranteed to be fully funded by the University and, based on merit, you can choose to do either a course-based master's or a thesis-based master's. This is unlike American universities because we drive our own research for the entirety of our program. Being just a master's student I've published as a first author in most of the major robotics conferences and journals (ICRA, IROS, JFR, TRO, WAFR) and not many master's students in other Universities have the opportunity to do that.

The Cost of Waterloo Software Engineering

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