Co-op and Experiential Education

The co-op program at Waterloo Engineering was a major draw for an incoming student who will start her studies this fall with backing from a prestigious scholarship worth up to $100,000.

Anson Yu of Langley, BC, is the latest Loran Scholar to choose Waterloo after landing a four-year scholarship aimed at finding and supporting high-potential young Canadians.

The start of the Spring Term, at the height of COVID, had instructors moving their courses to a remote format with students spread across time zones. It changed delivery, assignments and testing as in the case of Anton Mosunov, an award-winning lecturer in the Faculty of Mathematics who altered the MATH 135 midterm to an oral exam.

Marcelo Cortes
Faculty of Mathematics
> CTO and Co-founder, Faire

Since the age of 11, Marcelo Cortes has been passionate about computers and coding. By 13, he was considered the “resident computer expert” after his parents bought a system for their family-owned store in Brazil.

Norah McRae is leading a global conversation on the future of talent and lifelong learning.

Md. Abdul Chowdhury and his teammates never did get their virtual spaceship safely to Kepler-438b, an exoplanet situated hundreds of light years from Earth.

But all the hours they spent trying certainly weren’t wasted.

Whether they were able to conquer the difficult spaceship challenge or not, about 50 first-year engineering students at the University of Waterloo came away from a recent three-day event with valuable new technical skills and experience collaborating on complex problems in groups of up to 16 people.

Online learning is the new norm at the School of Pharmacy in Spring Term as a result of COVID-19. Faculty members are exploring a variety of innovative methods to deliver content and assessments in a virtual space.

It was an event well-attended, although presented entirely virtually for the first time ever.

Within the initial 12 hours, Velocity’s virtual Fund Pitch Competition (VFPC) garnered more than one thousand pageviews through its new VFPC video portal — a page designed specifically for this term’s competing entrepreneurs. Eleven companies went head-to-head in hopes of receiving up to $400,000 in pre-seed investments.

As Kerthanan Srikantharajah reflects on his time at the University of Waterloo, he feels that he’s leaving ready to become a leader and make things happen. Equipped with a BMath, Honours in Actuarial Science with a Finance option, Joint Honours in Statistics, a minor in Computer Science and four job offers, the road ahead looks promising.

Srikantharajah believes that Waterloo helped him to build the skills, knowledge and expertise necessary for the real world. His classes and co-op positions challenged him and gave him valuable experience that’s beneficial in today’s society.