Welcome back!
This week, new and returning students begin classes for fall 2023. New students have been participating in more than a week of orientation activities, from icebreakers to practical guides to student life
For new Math students, few events are as auspicious as the Pink Tie Ceremony, which took place this year on Tuesday, September 4.
The Tie Ceremony is the formal celebration of the Faculty of Math’s mascot, a pink tie, which dates back to 1968. The tie first became the unofficial symbol of Math at Waterloo in honor of Ralph Stanton, a visionary behind the Math Faculty who was known for his outlandish ties. You can read more about the Legend of the Pink Tie here.
Following a procession of the Tie Guard and a welcome by Dean Mark Giesbrecht, new students pledged “allegiance to the Tie of the University of Waterloo Mathematics and the faculty for which it stands. One faculty, under the dean, indivisible, with lemmas and algorithms for all.”
“We have a great opportunity here to band together and show the world what we can do,” Giesbrecht said in his opening address to students. “We’ll continue to find ways to innovate in our teaching, in our learning, and in our research, and you will be a part of that.”
Whether or not this is your first year of university, the transition to campus life can be a challenging one. We’ve collected some resources that you might find useful in the next few weeks:
Learn ways to get involved on campus
Check out five productivity hacks
Read seven tips specifically for new math students