Current students

Making photocopies wasn’t part of Jordan Grant’s job description. Neither were taking minutes, writing reports or any of the run-of-the-mill duties you’d expect to encounter in your first-year work term.

Feridun Hamdullahpur, president of the University of Waterloo, and Jordan Grant, recipient of Waterloo Engineering’s co-op student of the year 2015 award for his Deloitte Tech Exchange competition.

Chilling replicas of Holocaust architecture as featured in an Auschwitz gas chamber – the work of a team of University of Waterloo School of Architecture professors and students – are now being showcased at a renowned exhibition of architecture in Venice, Italy.

An otherwise ordinary outing produced exceptional results when six engineering classmates at the University of Waterloo travelled to nearby Hamilton in the summer of 2015 to explore waterfalls and escarpments.

It’s one thing to try and design a vehicle to travel on SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s proposed Hyperloop transportation system. It’s another to try and explain how it all works on live television in just a few minutes. Rather than make viewers struggle to imagine what that future will look like, Nicolas Achkarian managed it by using a visual metaphor from the past.

It was almost 60 years ago when Canada was in dire need of engineers that Engineering became the first and founding Faculty of the newly formed University of Waterloo. Now, Canada – and the world – is again clamouring for engineers to not only replace the retiring generation, but to lead innovation in emerging technologies. To meet this demand, it’s essential that the engineering talent pipeline be full of diverse, bright and uniquely educated people. 

The leap from engineer to entrepreneur was a logical one for Karen Tsoi (BASc 2009, Electrical; MMSc 2014, Management of Technology), owner of Pastel Dress Party, an online custom bridal party outfitting business. “Entrepreneurs, like engineers, are all about solving problems,” says Tsoi. “Every day I wake up and think about each business problem with an analytical mind, just like the engineer I am. It’s the same approach.”

To some people, a TV set is an object associated with wasting time. For Mike Volker, video terminals represented an opportunity to boost the productivity of computer science students and technology professionals around the world.

From a distance, it’s just possible to believe that University of Waterloo engineering professor Safieddin (Ali) Safavi-Naeini, who currently occupies the NSERC/ BlackBerry Industrial Research Chair in wireless communication, has a dull, dry and theoretical job in academia.

In the mainstream media and even within some business meetings, terms like “data analytics,” “data science” and “big data” are used so interchangeably that they might almost seem like the same thing. When you’re focused on the kind of work Samir Elhedhli is pursuing, specific to management engineering, the distinctions between them are critical.