Future students

“When I was a kid, I always begged my parents to buy me those little Mind Benders puzzles,” remembered Rose McCarty. “My favorite puzzles were the ones that were so difficult that I wasn’t sure whether or not I could actually solve them. At Waterloo Math, I’m the one coming up with different puzzles to solve. I have an opportunity to tackle big, imprecise, unwieldly problems that determine what my field will look like in 20 years.”

Hayley Reid almost attended another university. “I was leaning in a different direction, but Waterloo Math blew me away on Visitation Day,” she remembers. “There was a real sense of community, which was a key factor for me.” Hayley also had the opportunity to meet Dr. David McKinnon, her future PhD supervisor who introduced her to an area of research that blends geometry with number theory. “It was my first exposure to the field, and I was sold,” she says. She committed to a master’s degree in pure mathematics and never looked back.

As a student at a high school where two of the three math teachers were alumni of the Faculty of Mathematics at Waterloo, Eli Margolis learned to love math at a young age. “I appreciated the clarity of the problem-solving aspect,” she reflected. “There was always a right and wrong answer, always a correct way of figuring something out if you searched hard enough.”

“I wasn’t necessarily entrepreneurial in my time at Waterloo, but I was always very inventive,” remembered Jeff Shiner (BMath ’92), the CEO of a growing Toronto-based startup. “All I knew was that I wanted to create new computer programs.”

As Shiner came of age with the personal computer, he taught himself programming languages. “I remember getting my first Commodore 64 when I was 12 or 13 years old,” he says. “I geeked out at everything related to the computer. When it came time to decide on a university, Waterloo Math’s computer science program was the only one on my radar.”

The faculty is now the first Faculty of Mathematics to hold Sponsoring Institutional Membership of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM). 

AWM encourages women and girls to study and to have active careers in the mathematical sciences, and to promote equal opportunity and the equal treatment of women and girls in the mathematical sciences.

“My life has always been intertwined with water in one way or another,” realized Lizz Webb, who recently completed her master’s degree in applied mathematics at the University of Waterloo. As the captain of the swim team in high school, Webb has always loved swimming and lifeguarding, but she never expected to build a career at the intersection of mathematics and ocean sciences.

Maclean’s 2021 university rankings ranked mathematics and computer science at the University of Waterloo first in Canada.

A self-described “lifelong technology enthusiast,” Max Niebergall enrolled in the Master of Data Science & Artificial Intelligence (MDSAI) program to launch a impactful career in data science.

“Two of my high school math teachers were alumni of Waterloo Math, and they constantly raved about the university,” remembered Gurtaj Dhaliwal. “Their classes were always the most challenging, and they would say things like ‘You have to buckle down if you want to go to Waterloo!’”