This is a bit unrelated, but does anyone know how Waterloo became one of the best schools for Math/CS in Canada? I'm from Canada myself and almost went to Waterloo, and its always been a bit weird that Waterloo, a school that isn't really known for anything, doesn't have a long history, and is located in a random town unconnected to large firms, banks, and/or other universities (like the Bay area) has become so good for CS. Does anyone know the history behind it?
You have it a bit upside down. The 'Bay Area' doesn't get good students because of the Valley, it's the other way around. The Valley was made by good students from Stanford and Berkley.
Unis have always been a bit out of the way, they are not 'sponsored by banks' they were sponsored by Churches and congregations, then the elite.
Waterloo was Waterloo College, a Lutheran Seminary, and grew out from there.
It was successful probably because it was very much focused on Tech, unlike most other schools, and didn't appeal to multi generational families, but 'anyone'. The local mennonites are also extremely good students, you don't hear about them, but they get good grades.
It's a great tech school, but one of the ugliesst, most sparse and uninspiring campuses imaginable. If we think of traditional Uni like an 'Ivy Campus' or 'Oxford' aesthetically - UW is like one of those 1960's, concrete block kind of Soviet Utilitarian places. I mean it could be worse.
It also embraced the co-op system earlier than the other universities, which lead to more real world experience in tech for the students, and I think that filtered up to the faculty too over time.
>UW is like one of those 1960's, concrete block kind of Soviet Utilitarian places
The way I came to appreciate the aesthetic of UW was to realize it is a school of the 20th and 21st centuries, whereas the Ivies are schools of the 18th and 19th centuries.
When you think of an abstract university setting, ‘the future’ looks like UW.
There’s a number of policy decisions they made to sacrifice the wealth of the school / professors and care deeply about conflicts of interest. For example, any patents you get/inventions you make are your property for professors and students. Professors there are actively allowed to fight textbook fees like teaching from their own material. They’re often prohibited from benefiting if it’s their own book (I think they can give it away at cost or marginal markup). The students are not particularly affluent so there’s a good hacker culture going on (necessity breeds creativity). Engineering exams have a formal exam bank (can’t remember if student run or university sponsored) and give you all historical exams for that subject. This ensures that professors can’t just keep reusing the same material which would otherwise help students cheat by getting previous years exams (vs actually learning the material). There’s a focus on a mix of individual study / evaluation and group work. There’s also the famous co-op program that they pioneered that everyone is trying to mimic that connects them to industry. I think in the CS and maths departments they do a good job training for international competitions to get that prestige up. They also had really talented educators that really cared about getting kids to have fun in the first year (attrition rates would be a lot worse if the brutalism started early).
At this point it’s a reinforcing flywheel just like it is with MIT, Stanford, and Berkeley. I think they went with a different route though. They give minimal scholarships and afaik they don’t go out of their way to recruit wunderkids.
I suspect there isn’t any single answer / magic secret. They just built a good culture centered around teaching kids STEM effectively, kids and parents recognized it quickly enough which created natural competition to get in until it became a flywheel effect.
> inventions you make are your property for professors and students.
Originally this was only for professors (and I'm not so sure there weren't conflicts of interest). My first employer fought the university for the right to his Masters' thesis, and won, establishing the precedent for grad students (and hence my job).
His thesis was 1983, so it was well established by then. (It's not itself online, but in case anyone's curious, a description of a project using the work is at http://doi.org/10.1145/1096419.1096446 thanks to ACM now making all old papers free.)
It's a giant undergrad school (36,000 undergrads and barely 6,000 postgrads). There are more undergrads at Waterloo than at MIT, Stanford, CMU, Caltech, Harvard, Princeton and Yale... Combined! and they do coop, meaning their "break" semester alternates from from summer to fall to winter.
From what alumni told me, undergrads are incentivized to apply everywhere for internships as part of their courses and especially during the off-cycles (winter) for internships when they are effectively the only ones looking. Coop also means someone who can't convince an employer to pay for them won't graduate, so there's a nice selection bias.
