Catherine Dong is a mathematics student at the University of Waterloo and was a member of the Secretariat from 2019 to 2022. She gave the following speech at the Mathematics 4 Groundbreaking event in October, 2024.
I remember the first time I stepped on campus in 2019, when it was still just a maze of classrooms and bridges to me. The MathSoc Office layout was a lot more crowded then, with these old shelves overflowing with board games and conversation spilling into the hallway.
I was new to the campus, the city, and the province. I had no idea what major I wanted to declare, or what I would do with my degree — but I knew I wanted to study math.
A month into classes, I made a decision that changed my life: I walked into the Teaching Students Association (TSA) club office to ask someone about their program.
I remember first walking past the TSA office a few times, too nervous to duck my head in, until someone inside noticed and waved me in. It was a small room, with an old couch and a microwave that perpetually smelled like popcorn, and just enough space in the back for a pair of desks. A couple of questions for Thomas turned into a sitcom set, with other students popping in and out to say hi to somebody, to grab their lunch, to work on assignments together between class, to just sit down and join in on whatever the conversation was at the time. Everyone either knew someone already or shortly did. I came back again and again, and suddenly, campus wasn’t just somewhere I popped in and out of for classes — I was part of a community.
From there, if I had about another 20 minutes, I truly could draw a direct line from walking into that office, to getting involved with MathSoc, to meeting my partner of five years, Matthew, to moving to Ottawa to work for the Minister of Finance.
There are a lot of practical reasons to study math beyond a love for the subject — there’s the value of abstract thinking, of logic and rigorous reason, and, occasionally, the utility of statistical literacy. But I always come back to what feels inescapable: that math is simply beautiful.
Mathematics, in my mind, is a kind of magic. Sure, people find applications for it. But to me, at its core, math is something that transcends what we can see or touch — it’s in many ways only imagined — and somehow, we come together here to study it, to decipher its inner workings and discover what we don’t understand yet. Math can’t be observed, but somehow, we’ve built a community where we visualize it together.
We have a world-class Faculty of Mathematics here at Waterloo. And it’s not just because we recruit the brightest students, or the most accomplished professors, or even that we have the best dean on campus . . .
But it’s because we understand what math is and what it takes to pursue it. We bring together people who are curious, collaborative, and stubborn. We find ways to bring the best out of each other. We make space for students not just to grow as students, but as people. We invest in our future as a faculty, knowing that we’re only here because the University's founders believed in it enough, 60 years ago, to plant the seeds that have grown for us today.
Every building, classroom and hallway, is here because somebody knew what it could be one day, and they fought tooth and nail to make it happen. They did the work of convincing their colleagues, of finding funding, of drafting proposals, of finding funding, and securing donations…and finding funding. And then they helped to build a place where magic can happen.
I turned 22 this fall, and I’m suddenly one of the upper-year students who made space for me on that couch in MC one day. I can hardly believe that I’ve called this campus home for five years now. It’s been extraordinary to see it grow and change, especially as I’ve come to understand the years of effort behind every project. It’s made me immensely grateful to the students, staff, faculty, and alumni that chose to make their contributions to the campus’ future, even if it wouldn’t be their campus anymore. I’m proud that we’re doing the same now, for the next generation that calls this place home.