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University of Waterloo
University of Waterloo Coat of Arms
MottoConcordia cum veritate<br\>(In harmony with truth)
TypePublic
Established1957
Endowment$120 million
ChancellorMike Lazaridis
PresidentDavid Lloyd Johnston
Undergraduates23,043
Postgraduates2,838
Location
Waterloo
,
ON
,
Canada
CampusUrban/Suburban, 400 ha (1000 acres)
Sports teamsWarriors
ColoursGold, black, and white
Websiteuwaterloo.ca

The University of Waterloo, also known as "UW" or simply "Waterloo", is a medium-sized research-intensive public university in the city of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The enrollment for 2005 was 23,043 undergraduate and 2,838 graduate students, with 895 full-time faculty members and 2,090 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.

History

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).

The university's first president, Gerry Hagey, was able to gather teachers of engineering and basic sciences, and also obtained an initial grant of $625,000 from the government. The first classes began in 1957. In January 1958, Hagey and colleagues were able to purchase 237 acres of farmland in the area. Soon, construction began for the first academic building on the new site, which would be soon known as Engineering 1.

Through a series of delicate negotiations which turned into bitter hostilities, the "Faculty of Science and Engineering" broke free from Waterloo College. In early 1959, the government established three universities: Waterloo Lutheran University, University of St. Jerome's College, and the University of Waterloo. Initially, St. Jerome's and Waterloo Lutheran were both expected to federate with the new UW, but in the end Waterloo Lutheran chose to remain independent. UW then quickly created a faculty of arts in order to gain respect as a university. In the same year, arts students joined the science and engineering students in the new campus.

Three more church colleges ended up joining the university: Renison, Conrad Grebel, and St. Paul's. Waterloo created the first Faculty of Mathematics in the world, and the first co-op programs outside of engineering soon followed. The co-op system then was revised in involving four-month terms rather than the initial three-month terms. In 1967, the College of Optometry of Ontario, at the moment an independent institution in Toronto, moved to Waterloo and became affiliated with the university. Then, a physical education program was created, which later became the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences. The Faculty of Environmental Studies was created soon after.

More recently, in 2004, the School of Architecture was relocated to downtown Cambridge in an effort to give it more space to develop. The School, located in a former industrial building on the Grand River, is an important part of plans to bolster the economy of Cambridge's downtown area.

In 2001, the University of Waterloo announced its intentions to develop a Research and Technology Park on the university's north campus. The park intends to house many of the high-tech industries in the area and maintain the partnership between university and private-sector innovation. As of 2005, iAnywhere Solutions (a subsidiary of Sybase) and Open Text Corporation are the only tenants, but construction continues on the Accelerator Center, a multi-tenant building.

Reputation

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.

File:Billgtourwaterloo.jpg
Bill Gates speaks at the University of Waterloo.

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. During his visit to Waterloo in October 2005, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates stated, "Most years, we hire more students out of Waterloo than any university in the world, typically 50 or even more." [1]

Waterloo prides itself on its high performance in Maclean's Magazine's Canadian university rankings [2]. The university routinely places in the top three in the numerical Comprehensive ranking, and in the reputational survey it placed first as best overall 13 out of 15 times that the ranking was published [3].

In its article in November 2005 [4], Maclean's noted that "Waterloo is internationally recognized for the unparalleled success of its more than 100 undergraduate and graduate co-op programs."

The prowess of its students in academic competitions such as the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition and the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest has also greatly contributed to the university's reputation in the last few decades.

Ties with Industry

With three lakes and a conservation area on campus, Waterloo is home to a wide variety of vegetation and wildlife.

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 long-standing, very researcher-centric intellectual property policy [5], which has created many spin-off companies that maintain a good relationship with the University. In particular, UW has a strong connection with Research In Motion that goes beyond its close physical proximity. Co-founder and CEO Mike Lazaridis was a student at UW before he started RIM, and is currently the chancellor of the university. RIM hires hundreds of UW co-op students each term and a large proportion of its employees are UW alumni.

Some students and faculty dispute just how close to the industry the university should remain. In particular, the university came under criticism in August 2002 when the Faculty of Engineering accepted funding from Microsoft to develop courses using Microsoft's .NET Framework. [6]

Spin-offs

Several companies have roots in, or have been spun off from the university. They include:

Future plans

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. The project will cost $34 million for the first phase. Preliminary operations, including staffed medical and optometry clinics, are based out of the former Victoria Public School in Kitchener's downtown.

The Kitchener site is also to host a satellite campus of McMaster University's medical school, bringing 15 first-year medical students to Waterloo Region each year to study. They will remain until the end of the three-year McMaster program, and have the option of continuing as a resident in the area.

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.

With donations by alumni and matching contributions from government, the University announced in April 2004 the founding of the Institute for Quantum Computing. [7]

Construction will soon begin on a $70 million building to house the Institute for Quantum Computing as well as the new Nanotechnology Engineering program.

The University is currently constructing a $3.5 million building to house 2,000 networked computers, for use in the SHARCNET (Shared Hierarchical Academic Research Computing Network) supercluster. The building will also act as a direct link between the Physics building and the Engineering complex, and as extra office space and computing facilities for the Physics and Engineering faculties. [8]

Facts and figures

Math and Computer Science building.
  • UW was the first university in the world to establish a Faculty of Mathematics. The Faculty 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.
  • The university is represented in Canadian Interuniversity Sport by the Waterloo Warriors.
  • Contrary to a common opinion, the largest faculty of the university is the Faculty of Arts — not the Faculty of Mathematics nor the Faculty of Engineering.
  • On September 16, 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 both the official record of 7,043 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.
  • On Nov 30th, 2005, UW received Gneiss rock which is located at the Centre for Environmental and Information Technology. It measures 9.14 meters tall.

Famous alumni and faculty

Presidents and Chancellors

File:Dana-porter-1.jpg
Dana Porter Library, at the centre of the campus, commonly referred by its initials DP.

Presidents

Chancellors

Traditions and peculiarities

File:Pinktie.jpg
The Pink Tie on display on the wall of the Math & Computer building.
  • Student life converges upon the popular Student Life Centre, which has food, lounge, study and activities spaces and other services for students. The Turnkey Desk, located in the Student Life Centre's Great Hall, 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 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.
  • A unique species of tree is donated by each graduating class and planted on Alumni Lane.
  • According to urban legend, the Davis Centre is designed to look like a microchip in an aerial view of the building.
  • Similarly, the Math & Computer building is designed to look like a giant slide rule when viewed from the side.
  • A relatively common urban legend surrounding libraries has been attached to the Dana Porter library: namely, that the building is subsiding, as its structural engineering had supposedly not accounted for the weight of the books it contains. This, like similar legends pertaining other educational institutions' libraries, is false. [9] [10]

Orientation week

  • Students in the Faculty of Science receive safety goggles during orientation week.
  • Students in the Faculty of Engineering receive a yellow hard hat during orientation week.
  • Students in the Faculty of Mathematics receive a pink tie during orientation week, which is recognized as the unofficial symbol for mathies (math students). The story of the pink tie can be found at the 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.

Mascots

File:KingWarrior.jpg
King Warrior, the campus mascot
  • The University's mascot is a lion named King Warrior. The Warriors are the University's sports team and King Warrior's initials, K-W, reflect a common nickname for the Kitchener-Waterloo region.
  • The mascot for the undergraduate students' Mathematics Society (MathSoc) is the Natural Log (see natural log), which is a wooden log about two feet long, often mistaken as the Faculty's mascot
  • The mascot for the Faculty of Mathematics is a 40 feet long and 11 feet wide pink tie, often mistaken as MathSoc's mascot
  • 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 Ridge Tool Company in 1968.
  • The mascot for the Faculty of Arts is a statue of a boar which was donated to the University of Waterloo Math Faculty in 1978, and in turn donated to the Arts Faculty. It is one of six copies of Italian sculptor Pietro Tacca's (1577-1640) "Il Porcellino" statue. Students believe that rubbing the Boar's nose brings luck. [11]
  • The mascot for the Faculty of Environmental Studies is the Big Banana, which is actually a banana costume worn by a designated orientation leader.

See also

External links

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=University_of_Waterloo&oldid=41211951

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