Future students

Mythreyi Sivaraman had no trouble relating when she tackled a research project aimed at improving Internet connectivity in the developing world, especially in times of crisis.

As a girl in her native India, she saw first-hand how poorly prepared people were due to limited communications, both before and after, when a massive tsunami devastated coastal areas in late 2004.

Jim Wei (BASc 2000, Mechanical) doesn’t mind admitting that he barely scraped through while earning his mechanical engineering degree 16 years ago.

Learning to persevere, to do what he had to do just to graduate from the challenging Waterloo Engineering program, has been invaluable to him in the business world ever since.

“It’s a very competitive school and you’ve got to compete to survive,” says Wei, who now runs a thriving manufacturing company in Buffalo. “Books are books, they don’t teach you everything, but the environment at UW taught me a lot.”

Bjorn Dawson (BASc '16, Mechanical) was just 20 years old when he bought his first home in 2012 – and got a great business idea in the bargain. 

The previous owners were avid gardeners, so he experimented by planting a few seeds himself and discovered how much better homegrown produce tastes.

Do you want to help facilitate the upcoming global transition to electric cars, but remain in Waterloo? If so, Matt Stevens (BASc 2004, Chemical; PhD 2009, Chemical) is someone to talk to.

After obtaining a bachelor’s degree and his PhD from Waterloo Engineering, Stevens is currently the CEO of FleetCarma, a Waterloo-based firm that builds “the number one connected car platform for electric vehicles.”

We’ve all been there: paralyzed by too much information, too poorly organized.

It’s frustrating enough when you’re just trying to choose the right cellphone plan. The stakes soar, of course, if you’re operating a nuclear power plant, caring for cardiac patients or making a million-million-dollar trade on the TSX.

That’s where Catherine Burns comes in.

Chanakya Ramdev doesn’t mind being chief guinea pig as well as founder of Sweat Free Apparel, a startup company inspired by sticky personal experience during a Waterloo Engineering co-op work term overseas.

As he anticipates going into production and graduating with a degree in management engineering this fall, he credits his education with giving him the nimbleness needed to start from scratch and, hopefully, succeed in business.

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.