Away from the main Waterloo campus, specialized schools are anything but isolated
When many people think of the University of Waterloo, they think of the sprawling main campus, with its iconic buildings and courtyards, bustling with students.
But the University also has satellite campuses spread out across the Region of Waterloo and beyond, including the downtown Kitchener campus of the School of Pharmacy, the Cambridge campus of the School of Architecture and the Stratford campus of the School of Interaction Design and Business.
Although geographically separate from the main campus, there is a gravity that holds these distinct spaces together in common purpose.
For Austin Jack (GBDA in progress), a fourth-year student in the Global Business and Digital Arts program, building a sense of community is second nature.
He’s been helping students to become better design thinkers through an initiative called UWCube, a collaborative program giving hands-on experience and linking students with mentors.
“Having a little bit of separation from the main campus allows for a tighter community, and everybody in my program knows everybody else,” Jack said. “But during the pandemic almost everything was online, and I think that made for a different sense of connection with the broader Waterloo community. Since things have returned to in-person, there’s still lots of connections and collaboration across the campuses.”
In recognition of the 10th anniversary of the Stratford School of Interaction Design and Business, Dr. Christine McWebb, professor and its former director, appeared on the Beyond the Bulletin podcast to discuss its history and future plans. Listen here:
Austin Jack (GBDA in progress)
Arfa Aijazi is a new School of Architecture faculty member whose research focuses on how climate change impacts building performance. Although much of her work as an architectural engineer is at the Cambridge campus, she also spends time on the main campus.
“Waterloo has a reputation of being among the leading engineering schools in the world,” Aijazi said. “I was excited by the new architectural engineering program and the ambition to bring architecture and engineering disciplines together. The program is building bridges, and the students and professors hop back and forth, depending on our course assignments for the term”
As a new faculty member who joined the University in 2022, Aijazi said she was immediately made to feel welcome by her colleagues in the School of Architecture and the Faculty of Engineering.
Along with its campus in Cambridge, the School of Architecture also has a studio in Rome, Italy, one of the most architecturally impressive cities in the world. The studio hosts students and researchers with a desire to take the satellite campus experience even further afield.
Arfa Aijazi
When Dr. Rui Su (BSc ’18, PharmD ’18) completed her degree at Waterloo’s School of Pharmacy, she already had a clear idea of the challenges facing the health care and pharmacy sector.
“Working in diverse co-ops in the community, hospitals and rural and urban settings allowed me to see the systematic gaps within the health care system and the systematic challenges that pharmacists from different practice settings face,” Su said.
That’s what inspired Su and her co-founders to launch their own startup, MedMe Health. It’s a system that connects patients and pharmacists in a streamlined and intuitive way. The platform has been used by more than 20 million patients across Canada.
Su feels the University’s entrepreneurial ecosystem and spirit of innovation links all the campuses together.
“There’s a whole network that allowed me to speak to other founders and entrepreneurial people, and that’s how I connected to the co-founders I work with today.
Dr. Rui Su (BSc ’18, PharmD ’18)
