University of Waterloo
 | |
| Motto: Concordia cum veritate (Latin: In harmony with truth) | |
| Chancellor | Mike Lazaridis |
| President | David Lloyd Johnston |
| School type | Public |
| Religious affiliation | Main campus: None Conrad Grebel: Mennonite |
| Founded | 1957 |
| Location | Waterloo, Ontario, Canada |
| Enrollment | 22,241 undergraduate 2,666 graduate (2004) |
| Campus surroundings | Urban, suburban |
| Campus size | 4 km² (1000 acres) |
| Sports teams | Warriors |
| Mascot | Warrior |
| Colours | Gold, black, and white |
The University of Waterloo, also known as "UWaterloo", "UW", or simply "Waterloo", is a medium-sized research-intensive public university in the city of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The enrollment for 2004 was 22,241 undergraduate and 2,666 graduate students, with 818 full-time faculty members and 2008 staff. The University was founded in 1957.
The University of Waterloo is famous for being the groundbreaking proponent of co-operative education in Canada and currently maintains the largest such program in the world. With strong programs in engineering, mathematics, computer science, and science, the University has at times been touted as the MIT of Canada.
History and profile
The University of Waterloo was originally conceived in 1955 as the Waterloo College Associate Faculties (WCAF), a semi-autonomous entity within Waterloo College (now Wilfrid Laurier University). Its first classes began in 1957, and two years later it became the University of Waterloo. From its relatively recent and humble origin, UW has come to the forefront of research in Canada. The University of Waterloo now attracts many bright students from across Canada and is widely recognized as one of Canada's premier universities. It is also known for its longstanding undergraduate distance education programs.
Waterloo is famous for being the groundbreaking proponent of co-operative education in Canada and currently maintains the largest such program in the world. Due to this, Waterloo has established strong ties with many major corporations in North America. In the annual Maclean's Magazine university rankings, Waterloo consistently scores within the top three positions in its category (research-intensive institutions with a wide range of undergraduate and graduate programs without medical schools). Since the beginning of Maclean's university rankings, Waterloo has placed first overall out of all Canadian universities in the comprehensive category for a majority of the years (1992-1998,2000-2001), occasionally placing second to the University of Guelph. As of November 8th, 2004 the University of Waterloo has once again placed first overall in Macleans University rankings for the Comprehensive category.
The University has faculties of Applied Health Sciences, Arts, Engineering, Environmental Studies, Independent Studies, Mathematics, and Science as well as an on-campus school of Optometry. There are also four federated university colleges with religious affiliations on campus: St. Jerome's University (Roman Catholic), Renison College (Anglican), St. Paul's United College (United Church of Canada), and Conrad Grebel University College (Mennonite).
With strong programs in engineering, mathematics, computer science, and science, the University has at times been touted as the MIT of Canada. It is the home of the Centre for Applied Cryptographic Research and the Centre for Education in Mathematics and Computing. Additionally, the prowess of Waterloo's students in academic competitions such as the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition and the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest has greatly contributed to the University's reputation in the last few decades.
Ties with Industry
Through its large co-op program and many spin-off companies, the University maintains very close ties with the high-tech industry. The University has a very researcher centric intellectual property policy [1] which has created many spin-off companies that maintain a good relationship with the University.
The University came under criticism in August of 2002 when the Faculty of Engineering accepted funding from Microsoft to develop courses using Microsoft's .Net platform. [2]
Spin-offs
Several companies have roots in, or have been spun off from the university. They include:
- Maplesoft - flagship product, Waterloo Maple was developed as an advanced research project at the university.
- Open Text Corporation - enterprise content management company spun-off from The New Oxford English Dictionary Project which developed a computer search for the dictionary
- Watcom - former makers of a well-known C compiler, which has since been been open-sourced as OpenWatcom.
- Research In Motion - makers of the BlackBerry
- QNX - makers of the RTOS of the same name (with origins in the undergraduate Real Time Programming course.)
- Certicom - a security company specialising in elliptic curve cryptography
Future plans
The University of Waterloo School of Architecture was relocated to downtown Cambridge, Ontario in September of 2004. This will give the School of Architecture more space to develop, and could bolster the economy of the Cambridge downtown area.
The University of Waterloo Research and Technology Park is currently under construction on the University's north campus. The park is intended to house many of the high-tech industries in the area and maintain the partnership between university and private-sector innovation. iAnywhere Solutions, a subsidiary of Sybase, is currently the only tenant, but two more construction projects are underway in the park.
The University and the City of Kitchener are currently in the process of constructing a health sciences campus, including a School of Pharmacy, in the central Kitchener warehouse district. An architect, Robbie/Young + Wright Architects & Hariri Pontarini Architects, has been chosen. The project will cost $34 million for the first phase.
The University of Waterloo's Department of Systems Design Engineering recently announced its intention to have a new building exclusively for the department and its students by 2007. With support from the program's alumni, fundraising work began in 2004. The building is envisioned to change the way engineering design is taught. For example, it is planned to provide students with reconfigurable design workspaces and other features. In the past, innovations introduced by Systems Design are known to be eventually adopted by other engineering design departments, such as the integral first year design project component that was implemented decades ago.
With donations by alumni and matching contributions from government, the University announced in April 2004 the founding of the Institute for Quantum Computing. [3]
Construction will soon begin on a $70 million building to house the Institute for Quantum Computing as well as the new Nanotechnology program.
The University is currently developing an enrichment program for high school students. This program, scheduled to start in Fall 2005, has been named "Waterloo Unlimited." [4]
Records
On September 16th, 2004, the University of Waterloo's solar car team broke the Guinness World Record for the longest journey by a solar powered car. The solar car, called the Midnight Sun VII, broke the official record of 7,043.5 km (held by Queen's University) and the unofficial record of 13,054 km (held by Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia) after undertaking a 40-day tour of Canada and the United States, travelling a total of 15,079 km. The tour took the solar car through 7 provinces and 15 states.
Facts and figures
- UW was the first university in the world to establish a Faculty of Mathematics.
- UW's Faculty of Mathematics is the world's largest faculty in the mathematical, statistical, and computer sciences.
- UW accounts for more than $1.6 billion of economic activity (1999) in Ontario.
- Annually, UW attracts about 400,000 visitors from outside the region.
- A 1999 StatCan survey found that 22 per cent of the 454 university spin-off companies identified originated at UW.
- The university is represented in Canadian Interuniversity Sport by the Waterloo Warriors.
Famous alumni and faculty
- Andrej Brodnik - Mathematician
- David Cheriton - Stanford University professor, deal-maker for Google, Granite Systems, VMWare, #7 on 2005 Forbes Midas List
- George Elliot Clarke - award winning poet and writer
- Heather Dale - Celtic Singer
- Erik Demaine - computational geometry, youngest professor at MIT
- Tom Duff - computer scientist
- Gus German, Jim Mitchell, Richard Shirley, Robert Zamke - WATFOR Fortran Compiler
- Ann Hansen - Urban Guerilla
- Ziva Kunda - Psychologist
- Jean-Paul Lam - Economist
- Mike Lazaridis - founder of Research in Motion
- Rasmus Lerdorf - Systems Design Engineering - original author of PHP
- Parker Mitchell - Cofounder of Engineers Without Borders (Canada)
- W. T. Tutte - codebreaking (during WWII), combinatorics and graph theory
- Petri (Peter) Woldemar - renowned structural engineer
- I. J. Young - Renowned Ontario Educator
Presidents
- David Lloyd Johnston (1999-present)
- James Downey (1993-1999)
- Douglas T. Wright (1981-1993)
- Burt Matthews (1970-1981)
- Howard Petch (1969-1970)
- Gerry Hagey (1957-1969)
Traditions and peculiarities
- A unique species of tree is donated by each graduating class and planted on Alumni Lane.
- The Davis Centre is designed to look like a microchip in an aerial view of the building.
- Students in the Faculty of Science receive a white lab coat upon enrollment.
- Students in the Faculty of Engineering receive a yellow hard hat during orientation week.
- Students in the Faculty of Engineering receive the iron ring in their last term.
- Students in the Faculty of Mathematics receive a pink tie during orientation week, which is recognized as the unofficial symbol for math students. The story of where the pink tie originated can be found at the official Legend of the Pink Tie UW page.
- Students in the Software Engineering program, run jointly by the Faculties of Engineering and Mathematics, receive both a yellow hard hat and pink tie.
- The mascot for the Faculty of Math is a 40 feet long and 11 feet wide pink tie. The current tie is the third iteration of the original tie, it was purchased in 1989 but urban legend has it that should this tie be lost or damaged, it will not be replaced. The first tie was tie-napped in 1984 by the TLO, and the second tie was attacked by Engineers in 1986. Thus, the Tie Guard was formed. During the orientation week in September, the guards would set up tents and camp outside the MC building where the giant tie hung.
- The mascot for the Faculty of Engineering is a 60" pipe wrench called The Tool, formerly The RIDGID Tool, as it was donated by the Ridgid Tool Company.
- Student life converges upon the popular Student Life Centre, which has food, lounge, study and activities spaces and other services for students. Located in the Student Life Centre's Great Hall, the Turnkey Desk has been operating 24 hours a day, 365 days a year almost continuously since the opening of the Student Life Centre (then the Campus Centre) in 1968. Turnkeys are students who know just about everything there is to know about what's going on around campus and in the community, and help students as well as provide coffee, transit tickets, and other services. Turnkeys are so-named because they are the keepers of the keys for the many rooms in the Student Life Centre, and share their name with ancient jailers.