Co-op and Experiential Education

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.

Monica Hoang had no idea earlier this year that she’d be spending the last few months of her PhD working on the design of a COVID-19 testing kit.

The School of Pharmacy student moved back to her hometown when the University of Waterloo decided to go online for the spring term and planned to do her PhD defence digitally.

Then an old friend in the pharmacy program messaged her to say his colleagues were looking for somebody with a genetics background to join their team. The next day, Hoang was at a meeting in Waterloo’s Velocity startup incubator in downtown Kitchener.

Cheri Chevalier
Alumnus, Faculty of Arts (BA ’95)
> Global Director, Emerging Solutions, Microsoft Dynamics at Microsoft

When Cheri Chevalier interviewed at Microsoft Canada as a fourth-year Waterloo St. Jerome's University co-op student, she was surprised by the ambitious task assigned to her.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has forced the world to reconsider the way we live — right down to the structures that house us.

With more information surfacing on the transmission of the virus every day, professionals in architecture and design are re-imagining what a post-COVID society might look like.

It’s also prompting organizations to take a closer look at the layout of their quarters.

A new collaboration between the School of Architecture and Cambridge’s Self-Help Food Bank is one of these latest initiatives magnified by COVID-19.

This isn’t how the Faculty of Math’s class of 2020 envisioned their graduating year. Instead of walking across the convocation stage to receive their diploma in front of family and friends, students will participate in a virtual ceremony. Then, in the months ahead, these same graduates will seek work in one of the toughest job markets in recent memory.

But there is cause for hope and optimism.

In response to COVID-19, many organizations have had to pivot their businesses to an online model. But the technical and digital skills needed to do this work can be hard to find. The University of Waterloo has partnered with industry experts to fill this gap by equipping students with the digital skills employers are looking for to help transform businesses and workplaces.