Entrepreneurship

She noticed him as soon as she walked in, a handsome young man with blonde hair and a beaming smile at the back of the room.

It was the fall of 1974, the first day of classes for 90 incoming students in the University of Waterloo’s systems design engineering program.

And for two of them - teenagers Cille D’Eon and Rob Harris - it was the start of a 45-year partnership that would see them all the way through school, careers, marriage and parenthood.

This month, doors open at a new school in one of India’s most rural and impoverished regions to provide 300 children with a formal education— something many of their parents never had the opportunity to experience.     

The Steele Family Foundation, led by Michael Steele, a 1980 civil engineering alumnus, helped fund, design and build the school in the town of Mathigiri, just south of Bangalore, India, for young students from three to 10 years old. 

On May 15, the University of Waterloo welcomed the local chapter of the Young Presidents’ Organization (YPO) for an immersive experience exploring the link between entrepreneurship, experiential learning and transformative research.

Waterloo’s global network of 205,000 alumni is a force to be reckoned with.

The annual Alumni Awards recognize exceptional members in the Waterloo network, and the impact they’ve made during their careers. Here are just some of the ways these alumni go beyond to make positive change in the world.

With more than 205,000 alumni from 145 countries, our community has a real impact on the world.

Here are five young alumni who have taken their careers to the next level, disrupting industries and practices across the globe. Read on to meet these global game changers.

Fred Ngan (BMath ’07) and Michael Chan (BMath ’08)

Three Waterloo Engineering students have come up with a unique solution they feel may solve the housing crisis in Atlantic Canada’s Indigenous communities and possibly take a top award in Australia at the Hult Prize challenge, the world’s largest student social entrepreneurship competition.

A team of Management Engineering students at the University of Waterloo made the most of a second chance this week to become the big winners at an annual pitch contest for startups.

Thevany Narayanamoorthy, Dhruv Gupta, Garvita Rai, Rhea Philip and Sam Villaluz just missed the cut during a preliminary process to pick 15 finalists from over 50 applicants for the Norman Esch Entrepreneurship Awards for Capstone Design.

Graduate students at Waterloo are all working on solving important problems. But finding the right person, solving the right problem, at the right time has the special potential to become a business that can change people’s lives. 

At Waterloo, success is not always defined by job title or pay grade. See how four Waterloo alumni question common “good career advice” and are carving out a new set of rules.

The winners will receive, for the first time in the competition’s history, direct equity investments worth $50,000 each –