Introduce yourself briefly:
Hello there! My name is Gavneet Bhandal, I’m from Cambridge, Ontario, 25 mins outside of Waterloo and commute to school (feel free to ask me about the student commuter life). I am in the Management Engineering program, a part of class of 2026.
Waterloo Engineering in one word:
Ambitious.
I choose Waterloo Engineering because:
It gave me a challenge. Coming to Waterloo Engineering gave me the opportunity to push myself to the best version of me. On top of that Waterloo is a very diverse school which is something I always look for, coming from a very diverse background myself. Waterloo Engineering is one of the top tech schools in the country and the co-op opportunities provided through Waterloo’s co-op program are endless and exceptional. Waterloo Engineering also consists of amazing engineering disciplines and quite literally you can go into any one of the 15 disciplines and find success. For me, the Management Engineering program was the most attractive to me. The interdisciplinary areas within this program aligned with my interests in software, analytics and organization and allows me flexibility in my career and guarantees success.
The best thing about my program is:
Management Engineering is a very tight-knit program. The program consists of just under 100 students and we all interact with each other a lot, and will continue to as we will stick together for the next 5 years. Management Engineering has one of the highest co-op ratings, and all of the students in our program find a lot of success in co-op. We take a lot of cool courses during our upper years like Human-Computer Interaction, Machine Learning, Optimization and much more!
About my Co-op experience:
I am currently in my 2A term and in the co-op process, applying for jobs, preparing and doing interviews and much more! Even with all the anticipation, I didn’t realize how fun the process could be.
I wish I had known before I came:
That there will be low days and high days, that sometimes things won’t go the way you exactly wanted them to go or you’re not happy with some type of outcome, but I can promise you, your effort will always matter more than the result. You will have to push through and Waterloo Engineering will provide you all the resources to succeed. You will meet a lot of people, and you will create good friendships and relationships. The nervousness before starting university is valid, but all you need to know and believe in is that everything will be alright. I also wish I knew to take each day slowly, to appreciate the little things because time flies in university, you want to make the most out of each day.
Outside the classroom, I’m involved with:
- Engineering Tour Guides
- Management Engineering Coach
A fun project I’ve completed:
During my 1A term, my friends and I were teamed up together in our MSCI 100 class to create a student planner using Microsoft Excel and Visual Basic Applications (a coding language used within Microsoft products). We had a fun time making this project for the whole term and coded a habit tracker, an interactive calendar, to-do list and a Gantt chart - project manager. The project gave us a lot of freedom to pick and choose how we wanted to create the perfect student planner and we spent many evenings together in different campus buildings building our project.
One more thing about me:
I’m capable of speaking a few languages! But I can fluently read, speak and understand English and Punjabi. Some things I like to do are watch and play basketball, go biking with my friends, binge watch TV shows, and much more :)