Why University of Waterloo?
Waterloo has been named as "The Innovation City". It is a place of growth, modern innovation and a supercluster of high-tech research & smart urban planning. Waterloo-Toronto corridor takes the second spot for the largest concentration of tech companies just after California. McKinsey & Company boldly states that the region has the potential to become one of the world's top innovation ecosystems. The region not only represents 17% of Canada's GDP but is also home to the largest number of tech companies and one of the world's most sophisticated financial sectors. The region is very well surrounded with world-class academic and research centre, a large high-quality talent pool, access to capital, connective infrastructure & community, high standard of living and access to early adopters. All these ingredients pushes the region to reach top tier scale among Canadian Technology clusters. The corridor also serves major universities and are noted for their academic excellence and serves 20% of the country's university student. Among the major university in corridor, the University of Waterloo has the world's largest co-op education program and also ranked #1 among Canadian university for venture-capital-backed student businesses. The university also has country's leading industry-sponsored research program.
Past very well reflects the potential of the University of Waterloo. BlackBerry grew out of the student project and for years the university served as a reliable pipeline of stellar engineering talent into the nearby offices of tech companies, which includes American technology giants such as Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft. Apart from serving such big tech giants, the graduates from University of Waterloo are creating start-ups of their own such as Pebble, a smartwatch company founded by university grad and BufferBox, a parcel delivery system which was recently acquired by Google.
The university has attracted prominent faculty members & engineering and computer science student from around the world. The University of Waterloo does not require its faculty or students to give it any ownership stake in the products or inventions that they create there. I believe, the control of that intellectual property can potentially be far more valuable than any university salary for faculty members.
Another great aspect of the university is its constant thrive in the world of research and innovation. The David Jonson Research + Technology Park which is located on the North Campus focuses on fostering radical innovation. It houses technology-intensive companies undertaking applied research and innovative development in cooperation with the University of Waterloo. It is amazing how more than 70% of world's GDP runs on software created by companies located in the park.
Apart from the university's great reputation, it offers a substantial graduate coursework which perfectly aligns with my area of interest. The coursework seems to be very much systematic and offers great flexibility to students who might want to explore different aspects of engineering while mastering their own area of interest. The research facility of the university is very well structured as it divides the facility into different research groups and later divides it into projects. On research side, taking a quick look, the number and quality of publication in top scientific journal is self-explanatory. For the same reason, the university's computer science department has been constantly ranked as the top 25 in the world. Student-to-faculty ratio of roughly 25:1 makes me believe that professors are more easily accessible and fairly easy to schedule meetings outside the class time. Since the faculty members have more manageable workloads, they may also have more time to devote to helping students with questions and assignments.
By looking at the list of approved coursework at University of Waterloo, the professors involved in the research work incorporates the latest research and breaking development into their material and hence keeping the course up-to-date and more exciting. After seeing how heavily the university is invested into research work, it makes me believe that professors have an in-depth understanding of the material and can explain better - especially when it comes to graduate coursework which incorporates advance courses and topics. By taking all these things into consideration, University of Waterloo becomes my first choice to pursue my graduate degree and ultimately be a part of the ongoing research activity.