The Cost of Waterloo Software Engineering
blog.petersobot.com
blog.petersobot.com
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.
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.
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).
Academic excellence is an insufficient qualification for success in this field, even if your end goal is to stay in institutional research.
Being able to work in-industry is a requirement of the field no matter which corner of it you want to live in, and holding you back until you prove your ability to work in industry absolutely makes sense.
I suspect your friend was mistaken about what engineering meant.
On a more frank note: maybe more schools should slow down students who cannot prove rudimentary job-finding skills, maybe then we wouldn't end up with the legions of unemployable college grads we have today.
The systems design and mechatronics programs there are very strong. Given that your friend was in a competitive engineering program aimed at putting graduates into good industrial positions, the inability to find a position in two terms is probably a good sign they needed to re-evaluate if they were in the right program for them.
There is nothing arbitrary about this, and they communicate it quite well. It sounds like the system was working as designed, although I understand how this could have been a rough time for your friend. Then again, that's one of the things college is for, and it's hardly a unique situation.
A lot of high school students come into university with no job-finding skills, which are going to be critical to their future success. Job-finding, interview, and general industry skills are hard won through experience.
Like failing a course, failing to demonstrate rudimentary job skills should hold you back until you can gain these skills. For some people this takes longer than others (1A + 1B unemployment at Waterloo is somewhat rare), but repeatedly being unemployed is not necessarily a sign that someone doesn't belong entirely.
Knowing little about his friend, my first reaction is that maybe he should've stuck it out. Waterloo is a tremendous place to gain job skills - there is no more fertile ground to test resumes and interview skills at volume than it - I personally had over 70 interviews under my belt by the time I left that school.
If the answer is yes, then next thing is to figure out how to improve in that area.
I disagree strongly. Literally thousands of 1A students at Waterloo get placed every single semester, and while 1A unemployment rates are higher than any other term, still only a minority of students cannot find a job that term.
And nearly everyone finds something by their 1B term, putting them nowhere near at-risk from being held back.
Finding someone willing to let you intern as a kid fresh out of high school and only a few months into university is hard, but it is not insurmountably hard. This is an opportunity, not a burden - you gain far stronger job-finding skills than you would if you already had an impressive background.
Waterloo taught me more about hustle, presentation, honesty, spin, negotiation, and many other skills I'd never have learned had I already had strong credentials. The experience has made me a much, much stronger interviewee than most of the population, and has helped my career in huge ways.
A friend of mine literally drove down highway 401 with a pile of resumes, stopping at local factories and engineering shops to personally hand it to a hiring manager. This is the sort of desperation - but also hustle - that most people are never faced with, especially in our field. It is also the type of hustle that keeps paying even after you have a long and impressive resume.
On the other hand, if you are failing to find co-op jobs, I would wonder if you really want to graduate with that degree (presumably the job market is pretty tough, or the employers are noticing some other red flags like you're misogynistic in the interviews).
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
Weak ties with industries are important for theoretical research but a joke for programs like mechanical engineering.
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.
I'm a Waterloo MechE (of sorts, long story) and pretty sure you're misreading jarek's comment.
Ties to industry is the bread and butter of mechanical engineering (not electricians, not auto-mechanics, not technicians) - it's intensely application-focused (as all engineering disciplines are) and R&D traditionally has much higher capital costs than software, so you're practically forced to partner with industry.
When I was in school most research programs were funded by a combination of government funding and industry collaboration. On the MechE side, particularly in Waterloo (due to proximity to Canada's manufacturing belt) this seemed to be primarily automotive and manufacturing.
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 :)
> 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...)
(BASc-MTE '10 so I know the backstories.)
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.
I also agree its hard to gauge a university with just one metric.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.)
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.
(Waterloo's downtown is branded "uptown". Urg.)
After 5 long and difficult years,
I’m extremely proud to say that
I’m a Waterloo grad
From the hiring end, it works well. These graduates are typically very competent.
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.
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.
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!
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).
Edit: fail math x2