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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

by 1971genocide 12y 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.

jarek 12y 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.
- 1971genocide 12y 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.
  - jarek 12y ago
    > As far as I see it waterloo doesn't advertise itself as a polytechnic The marketing I see has very strong focus on co-op and particularity. I don't think anyone went into UW Software Engineering thinking they'd be doing ground-breaking CS theory. (Pure math or physics, on the other hand...) > 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 ? What rates do other polytechs charge? Are you talking about UW's domestic or international tuition? The latter is mostly supply and demand. > I disagree that mechanical engineering should be put in the same ranks as electricians/auto-mechanics. I agree so it's probably a good thing mech eng co-ops design and debug auto assembly plants :)
    - kps 12y ago
      > I don't think anyone went into UW Software Engineering > thinking they'd be doing ground-breaking CS theory. > (Pure math or physics, on the other hand...) Waterloo has a long-standing Computer Science department as part of the Faculty of Mathematics as well as a (comparatively recent) Software Engineering program in the Faculty of Engineering.
      - jarek 12y ago
        The post is about SE in particular so I mentioned that. Obviously a CS degree can be made much more theoretical, downright to co-op being optional as mentioned elsewhere. (BASc-MTE '10 so I know the backstories.)
  - 12y ago
leothekim 12y 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 12y 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.
- 1971genocide 12y 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.
  - cbhl 12y ago
    FWIW, there are students who studied C&O and then started data-oriented start-ups.
potatolicious 12y 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).
- 1971genocide 12y 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.
  - jarek 12y ago
    If you want to focus only on academics, engineering is a bad place to start. Mechatronics is a co-op program. Always has been. You've always had to do at least 5 work terms in the 6 available slots. Sounds like your friend picked a wrong faculty. Odd, since co-op and jobs and real-world-work features in engineering marketing so prominently.
ska 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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.
alanctgardner3 12y 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.
aianus 12y 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 12y 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/university-data-and-statistics/common-university-data-ontario-cudo-0/common-university-data-ontario-cudo-2013/section-b-common-university-data-ontario-2013#sectionb3 https://uwaterloo.ca/institutional-analysis-planning/univers... [2]: https://uwaterloo.ca/institutional-analysis-planning/university-data-and-statistics/common-university-data-ontario-cudo-0/common-university-data-ontario-cudo-2013/section-k-common-university-data-ontario-2013#sectionk2 https://uwaterloo.ca/institutional-analysis-planning/univers...
zenbowman 12y 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 12y 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
peeters 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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.

jarek 12y 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.

1971genocide 12y 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.
- jarek 12y ago
  > As far as I see it waterloo doesn't advertise itself as a polytechnic The marketing I see has very strong focus on co-op and particularity. I don't think anyone went into UW Software Engineering thinking they'd be doing ground-breaking CS theory. (Pure math or physics, on the other hand...) > 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 ? What rates do other polytechs charge? Are you talking about UW's domestic or international tuition? The latter is mostly supply and demand. > I disagree that mechanical engineering should be put in the same ranks as electricians/auto-mechanics. I agree so it's probably a good thing mech eng co-ops design and debug auto assembly plants :)
  - kps 12y ago
    > I don't think anyone went into UW Software Engineering > thinking they'd be doing ground-breaking CS theory. > (Pure math or physics, on the other hand...) Waterloo has a long-standing Computer Science department as part of the Faculty of Mathematics as well as a (comparatively recent) Software Engineering program in the Faculty of Engineering.
    - jarek 12y ago
      The post is about SE in particular so I mentioned that. Obviously a CS degree can be made much more theoretical, downright to co-op being optional as mentioned elsewhere. (BASc-MTE '10 so I know the backstories.)
- 12y ago

leothekim 12y 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 12y 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.

1971genocide 12y 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.
- cbhl 12y ago
  FWIW, there are students who studied C&O and then started data-oriented start-ups.

potatolicious 12y 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).

1971genocide 12y 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.
- jarek 12y ago
  If you want to focus only on academics, engineering is a bad place to start. Mechatronics is a co-op program. Always has been. You've always had to do at least 5 work terms in the 6 available slots. Sounds like your friend picked a wrong faculty. Odd, since co-op and jobs and real-world-work features in engineering marketing so prominently.

ska 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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.

alanctgardner3 12y 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.

aianus 12y ago

cldellow 12y 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/university-data-and-statistics/common-university-data-ontario-cudo-0/common-university-data-ontario-cudo-2013/section-b-common-university-data-ontario-2013#sectionb3 https://uwaterloo.ca/institutional-analysis-planning/univers... [2]: https://uwaterloo.ca/institutional-analysis-planning/university-data-and-statistics/common-university-data-ontario-cudo-0/common-university-data-ontario-cudo-2013/section-k-common-university-data-ontario-2013#sectionk2 https://uwaterloo.ca/institutional-analysis-planning/univers...

zenbowman 12y 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 12y 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

peeters 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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 12y 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.