10 ms·

University of Waterloo: Silicon Valley's Canadian Feeder School

• caval 13y 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 13y 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 13y ago
    Business Week isn't real journalism. No surprise here.
• drpgq 13y 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.
  • canistr 13y 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.
    • aianus 13y ago
      CS with coop is $6300 a term. I think engineering is a few hundred more.
      • kenrose 13y ago
        When I started in 2000, it was around $3000 per term all in (tuition, co-op fee, and all the other misc. fees). When I graduated in 2005, it was $4200 per term. That's an increase of 7% per year on average. From 2005 to now (@ $6300), it's gone up 8.5% per year on average. Good to see that the university is keeping tuition affordable by keeping up with inflation. Not.
        • lanstein 13y ago
          Ken I won't tell you what we're paying down here for tuition then ;)
        • mrtron 13y ago
          I think my first term was $2700/school term + 500/work term as a co-op fee. (in 2001).
    • ChronosKey 13y 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.
      • canistr 13y ago
        I ignored incidental fees from my figure. Strictly the tuition cost. Also factoring in the point that tuition for engineering is making a major hike (I think it was 5%?) and a lot of students get the 30% tuition cut from the provincial government (although this doesn't apply to 4B students).
      • andrewmunn 13y ago
        Oh wow it's increasing fast. When I started Soft Eng in 2008 it was like $5000. At graduation it was $6500. This is nuts.
  • richardlblair 13y ago
    If you go to a good school in Ontario you are looking at $7000 at least
  • roflmfao 13y 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.
    • aianus 13y 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.
      • canistr 13y ago
        Same. I never qualified even when I declared myself as an independent.
• stickhandle 13y 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.
  • guyzero 13y ago
    Yes, this is like calling Sunnyvale a sleepy, post-agricultural city of 100,000. It's somewhere between inaccurate and disingenuous.
    • Apocryphon 13y 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.
  • rll 13y 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.
  • potatolicious 13y 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.
  • richardlblair 13y 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
• guyzero 13y 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).
  • drpgq 13y 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 13y 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.
      • guyzero 13y ago
        Every tech company I've ever worked for in Toronto has been acquired by a US company. Quest Software/Dell, Oracle, Microsoft, and the former Novell... the only bad part is that these offices don't always keep hiring post-acquisition. But that has more to do with acquisition dynamics than Toronto being a bad place for a satellite office. But I disagree that Canadian developers would be appreciably cheaper. There are plenty of cities in the US that would be as cheap or cheaper than Toronto or Waterloo for a dev office.
      • memracom 13y ago
        Hear, hear. Google really needs to take a hint from BufferBox. If they can set up parcel delivery sites everywhere, what about setting up small to medium sized offices in every major city so that people don't have to relocate to work with them. Start with Vancouver. Mozilla has an office here in Vancouver and near as I can tell its only function is so that local people can work close to home on one or another of the Mozilla projects. In my opinion, this is the future of work. Small hubs colocated with other small hubs, so that you are not working remote alone, but with a handful of coworkers in a larger office environment that has many businesses sharing a building and the overhead things like receptionists, room booking, coffee rooms, etc.
• toblender 13y 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.
  • potatolicious 13y 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.
• gotrecruit 13y 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 13y 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.
  • richardlblair 13y 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.
    • toblender 13y ago
      I agree, I got rejected from Waterloo as well, but I did fine going to U of T.
      • gotrecruit 13y ago
        i'm a little confused though. UofT is supposedly the #1 engineering school in canada, though it does not have the same startup reputation as Waterloo, but you're saying if Waterloo denied you, you still stand a good chance making it to UofT? I'm planning to apply to UofT and UBC as well, so this is pretty good news to me.
        • toblender 13y ago
          IMO it really doesn't matter what University you go to as long as you finish. The degree is just a way to show employers you can endure a taxing 4+ years. Waterloo has co-op, 4 months school, 4 months work. This is really good for getting a feel for where you want to work. But the amount of time at the company isn't all that much. Depending on the company they may be reluctant to give you anything big to work on as you will be gone soon. U of T has PEY, professional experience year, 12-16 months of internship. I really enjoyed my year off, made what I learnt at school make sense. When I came back to school after a year I was much more committed. The downfall is that for a few summers you maybe doing odd jobs to get by. In terms of education, I think it really depends on the student. But talking to my buddies that went to Waterloo, the classes are smaller and it sounds like they actually care that you pass. At U of T you get so much thrown at you that you have to learn what is important and only focus on those things. Pass or fail is up to you as it is super competitive. Best of luck!
• parasubvert 13y 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 13y ago
  For anyone wanting to hire students from Waterloo / looking for work in the area: https://uwaterloo.ca/jobmine/employers https://uwaterloo.ca/jobmine/employers / https://uwaterloo.ca/hire/ https://uwaterloo.ca/hire/ http://waterlootechjobs.com/en/ http://waterlootechjobs.com/en/ http://www.techjobswaterloo.com/ http://www.techjobswaterloo.com/ http://www.communitech.ca/ http://www.communitech.ca/
  • prostoalex 13y ago
    And if you want to have a lengthy conversation with CS majors at Waterloo, bring up Jobmine. Jobmine is healthcare.gov of UW.
• pg 13y ago
  There is something special about Waterloo. We noticed it a couple years ago.
  • redthrowaway 13y ago
    What's special about UW students/grads, and what do you attribute it to?
    • dfrey 13y 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.
      • hatred 13y ago
        After working with so many bright colleagues from Waterloo, I knew such an article was bound to come up one day considering they are known so less here in the valley. Coming from a collegiate programming world, their ACM ICPC record is also pretty top-notch.
    • adamtait 13y 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.
• scosman 13y 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 13y ago
    We tend to trade back and forth with Stanford for top at Apple too.
• Oculus 13y 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 :)
  • rohitv 13y 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 :)
  • cbhl 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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.
      • 13y ago
• hoverkraft 13y ago
  Currently working with a Waterloo intern and I can personally attest that he is the bomb.
• adamtait 13y 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 13y 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 13y ago
      Among the "rich" countries, Canada is one of the most open in the world to skilled immigrants.
      • niuzeta 13y ago
        it's getting harder. slowly but definitely.
    • guyzero 13y ago
      What? No.
    • bzmwillemsen 13y 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/index.asp http://www.cic.gc.ca/ENGLISH/immigrate/business/start-up/ind... Then work your way towards citizenship.
• richardlblair 13y 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 13y 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 http://www.bulletin.uwaterloo.ca/2011/feb/25fr.html)
    • canistr 13y 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).
    • vation 13y ago
      WaterlooWorks is set to be available for Arch students Spring 2014, with a full release in Winter 2015 I believe.
• kohanz 13y 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?".
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • solox3 13y ago
    According to Google's top hit, Waterloo also happens to be "the top poker university": www.pokerlistings.com/blog/top-5-poker-universities
    • paulgb 13y ago
      One alumnus the university tends not to brag about is Calvin Ayre, founder of the bodog online poker empire.
  • paulgb 13y 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.
  • Pxtl 13y 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 13y 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.
• memracom 13y 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.
  • deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  • paulgb 13y 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 13y 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 ...
    • usernew1817 13y 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...
• brandonb 13y 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/ 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y ago
  I find it very strange that they picked BufferBox instead of Thalmic Labs.
  • kcbanner 13y ago
    Why?
• ryguytilidie 13y 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 13y 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).
• rohitv 13y 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 13y ago
  More evidence for Waterloo's "specialness" can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lowell_Putnam_Mathematical_Competition 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 13y ago
    Another is the schools consistently high placement in the ACM's ICPC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACM_International_Collegiate_Programming_Contest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACM_International_Collegiate_P...
• niuzeta 13y 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 13y 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 13y ago
    Plus you got to play with trains.
    • usernew1817 13y ago
      when they're actually working...
  • tezka 13y ago
    "Please refrain from feeding RT students. We are NOT monkeys." The sign on the real-time lab's window used to read.
• BenoitEssiambre 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y ago
  UW has had a great CompSci program for decades. WATFOR has celebrated it's 50th anniversary.
• CurtMonash 13y 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 ...)