University Of Waterloo
University Of WaterlooA Canadian university, located around 120 km southwest of Toronto, in the Kitchener-Waterloo area.
Waterloo is renowned for its CoOpEducation program, where students alternate four months of school with four months of work. Several thousand engineering, CS and accounting students are placed in jobs world wide through this system every term. It has served as a model in providing a mixture of theory & practice at the university level, and also making university more affordable to students.Recently the co-op system has come under heavy competition from other universities in both Canada and the U.S.
Waterloo is also one of a handful of universities that has a Faculty of Mathematics, and hands out Bachelor of Mathematics degrees to Computer Science students.Its CS program is also well known to be heavily focused on practical programming skills, while its new Software Engineering program focuses heavily on software design.
Shameless plug: Anyone attending U of W is advised to sign up for Microeconomics 101 and Macroeconomics 102 with LarrySmith. They are perhaps the most important, entertaining, and informative courses available at the school. Larry has received the distingished teaching award at the University several times.
Well-known graduates: [add some if you know any]
This faculty has one of the top undergraduate programs in Mathematics, at least in North America. Ditto for the CS and CE programs.
For some definition of "top". In the 90s, CarletonUniversity had the distinction of having the only OO program in North America. Now? It dismantled it.
Waterloo has a top-notch reputation among businessmen. If your intention is to get into a big corporation then go to Waterloo, it's tops. If your intention isn't to whore yourself then you may just have to think twice about the merits of competing against the herd.
It isn't meaningful to say that a university is "top" of anything. Universities are specialized and even a single field such as mathematics is too large to be fully compassed by a university. For instance, Carleton's mathematics faculty is stuffed with experts in Algebra, so much so that Calculus is taught by an algebraist.
And then of course there's the question of whether an university is good at research or teaching. And then its social values. Who here wants to go to a top-notch Bible college? Waterloo's propaganda department would like you to believe that none of these things matter, that only the university's ranking in MacLean's does. After all, MacLean's knows your preferences better than you do yourself, so its ranking is authoritative of what you want.
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