Co-op and Experiential Education

Graeme Tooley is a fourth year Global Business and Digital Arts (GBDA) student and avid hockey fan. During his recent co-op term, he had the opportunity to work for The Hockey 4 Youth Foundation through Waterloo's Co-op for Social Good program.

“Being able to work for Hockey 4 Youth this past summer was an incredible experience, and I truly felt and saw that the work I was doing was having an impact.”

Students from the University of Waterloo and four other Ontario institutions can vie for cash prizes and the chance to establish a startup by licensing a novel technology.

The Proteus Innovation Competition is a four-month competition that challenges students to craft compelling commercialization strategies for one out of five promising technologies with the chance to win a slice of more than $25,000 in cash prizes and the opportunity to license the technology and form their own startup.

The University of Waterloo is known for educating future-ready graduates. Our students have earned a reputation for having the skills, knowledge and experience to add value within their first days on the job. Much of this learning happens on campus, but at Waterloo the learning continues during co-op work terms at leading companies across Canada and around the world.  

Equipping business leaders with valuable insights on how companies, governments and society are adapting to the rapid pace of technological change was front and centre at the inaugural Tech Horizons Executive Forum on Wednesday.

Hundreds of executives attended the sold-out event in Toronto with a unique, University of Waterloo-curated perspective that showcased the innovative lessons learned by business leaders managing the world of technological disruption.

Earlier this week, the Ontario government announced that they would introduce legislation that would require organizations to include salary ranges in job postings. Recently, the University of Waterloo made the salary field in co-op job postings mandatory.  

A team from the University of Waterloo has won a place in the Battery Workforce Challenge. It is a new three-year student competition that launches in fall 2023 to challenge universities from across North America to design, build, test and integrate an advanced electric vehicle (EV) battery pack in a Stellantis vehicle. The first year of the competition focuses on the design of the battery pack, the second year on the implementation of the design, and the final year on working to integrate the battery pack into a Stellanis vehicle.

According to the World Health Organization, by 2050, those aged 60 years and older will number approximately 2 billion, a significant rise from 900 million in 2015. In response to the aging global population, health-care systems confront the immense challenge of catering to the requirements of older adults, presenting challenges for individuals, health-care providers, caregivers and the institutions serving them.

Drawing on deep experience in entrepreneurship and investing, community leaders Neil Murdoch and Mike Stork shared their knowledge on how to establish a successful startup to University of Waterloo students at a Founder Fireside Chat event, hosted by Velocity in collaboration with the University's Office of Advancement.

At the intersection of data privacy, open science and public health, the University of Waterloo has initiated a collaborative effort with several Canadian government agencies to explore the use of synthetic data for research and analysis.

Dr. Helen Chen, a professor in the Faculty of Health and director of the Professional Practice Centre in Health Systems is leading the initiative.

Having weathered the COVID-19 pandemic far from home, Waterloo Engineering alum and Muay Thai instructor, Qianshu Wang (BASc ‘19, Nanotechnology Engineering) is back in Waterloo figuring out his next move.