University of Waterloo students have built one of the fastest-growing local chapters of an international maker collective called Socratica. More than 2,500 students gathered at the 2025 symposium in Waterloo to build, innovate, design, engineer and collaborate.
The organization was founded in 2022 and has since involved hundreds of volunteers from a variety of disciplines. Its success stems from harnessing the Waterloo entrepreneurial ethos and inviting thousands of students from multiple disciplines to make magic together.
Over 70 Waterloo students presented their projects at the symposium, spanning art, engineering, business, design, poetry and everything in-between.
“Socratica is unlike anything I've seen in my years working with students. They've created something remarkable — a community where everyone from artists to tech entrepreneurs work side by side as builders,” says John Dick, senior director of Founder Development at Velocity, the University’s incubator hub and one of Socratica’s local partners.
Socratica’s symposiums have tripled in size with each edition. The collective now has a presence on every continent and wants a chapter in every major city around the world.
“People want to feel that there are people excited and doing something about making the future better,” Anson Yu, a fourth-year systems design engineering student said in a news article. "Socratica provides the “social permissioning” to try something new."
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