University of Waterloo Students Win Facebook's Hackathon (opens in new tab)

I think those are two very strong reasons. However, at the end of the day, Waterloo puts its students through the meat grinder. My nephew studies there and I am blown away by the stuff he is getting taught in first and second year.

The thing that surprised me was when he tried to apply to Silicon Valley start-ups, he got very limited response. I think part of it is that people don't realize how awesome Waterloo is.

For better or worse because of the university's reputation they now attract the best students coming in and, guess what, they graduate the best students at the end. Like many great universities they benefit from selection bias. If you're a Canadian kid who wants to get the best CS or engineering education then U Waterloo is on your shortlist. (That said, it's not the only really good school for CS or engineering in the country as some U of T grad will probably be quick to point out.)

Waterloo is the MIT of Canada, so it attracts top Canadian tech students. It's also in the most populated region of Canada, so it being close to home (but not too close) for most students helps too.

The university also has an on-campus tech incubator for ground-level projects and an off-site workspace for early/medium-stage projects. Through the incubator the university also provides seed-level funding for students to turn projects into businesses (BufferBox was one recipient).

That co-op program is responsible for me being in software development. I started in CivEng, but every co-op term I had was a programming position. So I happily dropped CivEng and started doing what I had been doing on my own from a young age.

The co-op program is also the primary reason I chose Waterloo. You can't beat paying for school as you progress through your terms. Back then you could earn enough during a work term to fully pay for next term's fees and books.

Waterloo is well known in Canada for having an exceptional Mathematics program (if I'm not mistaken you graduate with BMath, not a BA/BSc with a math major).

As for #2, that's common in Canada.

UBC, SFU, and most of the top-tier schools here have what we call a "Co-op" program that is open for both undergrad and grad students.

Typical placement is 4 months long but some companies prefer 8 months (2 terms). Students start their co-op program probably by the end of their second year so that they at least have some foundations.

Most schools have their internal websites where companies can post job-descriptions and students can apply to these jobs.

I don't know if this is true for all provinces but at least in British Columbia, the government subsidized these co-op programs by paying half (or even more?) of the students salary (oh yes, co-op placements are paid internship). This is a BIG BIG plus as it makes placement easier to swallow for the companies.

I've done 16 months of co-op with various roles (Build, QA, Integration, Dev) and greatly appreciated all parties (school, employers/companies, government) that make this happen.

I would think, massive investment from RIM back when their situation was not as bad.

The influx of money helps the university finance research and various enterprises, which in turn results in yet more success stories, and yet more investments. It's a virtuous circle I guess.

Culture is also a big reason. People at Waterloo talk about engineering/CS/whatever non-stop. A colleague of mine went back to do his PhD at Western and his biggest observation was that the kids in the hall weren't talking about what project they were working on, they were talking about parties and clothes and whatever. While selection certainly helps with this, the culture of a school also has a huge impact in this regard.

There is also a large focus on entrepreneurship. There's a lot of support for students to start their own businesses. Such as an incubator residence (http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/). I also know that when my brother decided to leave school to work with a startup in the area the school told him that if he ever wanted to finish his degree he just needed to tell them.

This ties into #1 and important to also mention:

Undergraduate students also own all of their own IP. If you want to commercialize something you've worked on in school, you don't even need to deal with a tech transfer office: you just do it.

I'd say #3, similar to other top schools, is that your fellow classmates inspire you with the work they do and the projects they create. It's hard to not want to push yourself to really improve your skills when you see your friends win a global Facebook hackathon, work at top-tier companies, release projects that get over half a million users; it's a huge motivator for me personally. I bet many others feel the same way.

Something missing from the list is how vibrant it is: it's a hard-working student body + people who attend the school for tech + local companies.

-Waterloo grad

Waterloo has a co-op program where you switch off every four months between working and school. The co-ops can be very well compensated, so many students graduate with little or no student debt.

The thing with the university of waterloo is the opportunity for where you coop. How many people at UOttawa get jobs with Facebook, google, apple, MS, twitter and various startups in the valley with jobs paying in excess of $30 an hour?

To give you an idea of how popular UW is in the valley, right now apple has 50~ interns, about 35~ of which are from Waterloo, and a couple from BC. The rest are from the states. And this is the case in many of the companies down here.

I'm a uwaterloo alumni. I have to say that the single greatest reason to attend a university such as Waterloo is to meet like-minded people who are as passionate as yourself. Learning is not just about knowledge, it's about building experience.

I'm of the opinion that you learn way more by actually doing things at a start-up, small business, or Facebook or Google, and that Waterloo is great for giving you the opportunity to do that. Sure, the lectures are useful for theory of computing and algorithms, but if you're here wanting to learn how to program or how to write SQL, you're wasting your money and time.

That said, the last UOttawa student I knew who transferred to Waterloo failed their first term here, so don't do it just because people on HN said so.

>doing projects by myself.

Probably not given that limitation. I didn't go to UofW but I spent about a year in Waterloo on an internship. In terms of the experience that you'll get out of it, one of their biggest assets is probably the type of students that they draw - if you won't be working and learning with/from them, then it probably won't be worth it.

Well if your looking to hire Co-ops from the university here is the link https://uwaterloo.ca/jobmine/employers

The university has it's own job site for co-op students, Jobmine. You can find more info here, https://uwaterloo.ca/hire/

There are two local jobsites:

http://techjobswaterloo.com

http://waterlootechjobs.com

The latter seems to break posting up between StartUp or non StartUp.

Check http://communitech.ca which is an organization which supports tech companies in the area.

We have an internal job posting, you can access it here at jobmine.uwaterloo.ca; there are separate postings for co-op and alumni students.

This is one of the most active sites: http://waterlootechjobs.com/

Waterloo was a MSFT poaching ground when I was an undergrad in 1992... well before RIM was even on the scene. Macleans magazine has consistently ranked it the best engineering school in Canada. They've been winning ACM programming contests since the math building had the dinosaur pit (http://ist.uwaterloo.ca/cs/redroom/).

As for campus being ugly... hey, you can't have everything.

While Waterloo has been a talent poaching ground for Microsoft and RIM for a while, and more recently for Google, Facebook and the likes. The thing i think that really gets overlooked is the startup community in the area.

With an incubator residence on campus (http://velocity.uwaterloo.ca/)

Another new incubator in the region (http://hyperdrive.communitech.ca/#applyNow)

An organization dedicated to helping startups in the are (https://www.communitech.ca/)

The recent successes of companies like BufferBox and Kik, have showed that startups can succeed and thrive in the area.

I talked to an MS recruiter a couple years ago who said they hired more graduates from Waterloo than any other school.

I agree that it's mostly a concrete jungle, but there are some new buildings going up. The new Quantum Nano Centre just opened a few months ago, and it looks pretty spiffy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAZXcVLMMG0

No kidding. The buildings are getting nicer but there is almost no green space left on campus.

178 is the number, and 72 is the percentage. Unfortunately the comma is easy to mistake for a period.

False. There are many women in Waterloo, of which I am one. My chemical engineering class was about 32% female, but many of the programs at Waterloo have more women than male in them.

While Waterloo often does seem to be about 178.72% male, parts of engineering are at parity (chem eng was 50/50 a few years back) and there are entire other faculties with lots of lovely people for you to make friends with.

Sounds about right for a Waterloo CS student.

Maybe I'm getting old (closing on 30) and nostalgic but the new generation of Waterloo students are making me proud and seem to be going further than my classes.

Although, I'm also gaining a little pride myself. I did was a research assistant at CTN and built the first UI tool for building the brain model. And I just joined Facebook and had the Waterloo students win the hackathon next door on my second week :)

Indeed, big things in the pipeline!

yeayea, waterloo ;)

Facebook's global university hackathon.

There were 17 teams apparently, here's a better article: http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2012/12/01/facebook-universit...

Technically, they've won both. To qualify for the global hackathon, they had to win the local one first.

UIUC was 2nd. I was on this team. We did a Street Fighter browser-based game controlled by webcam. You can play against friends over the internet in realtime.

MIT was 3rd with a chrome extension called "minimap" that allows you to scroll in your browser with smartphone or webcam. Also allows you to have a "minimap" next to your scrollbar that shows a preview of the entire webpage

CMU got an honorable mention for a real time strategy (?) game called "The Hackers" that is based on managing a team for a hackathon.

UBC was there, but I've forgotten what their hack was. Sorry! Was really tired and nervous during demos!

Facebook showed me the time of my life. Eager to apply for a job there...

it's Water Water Water - Wu Wu Wu

Hello Melvin.

icewater: Ninjaquote was our winning project for the regional Waterloo Hackathon. It was a name chosen at the (nearly) last minute, when the domain with the name that we originally wanted wasn't available. :) -- Jinny