Talent

“I love the balance of having a semester where I can study a variety of subjects that will go towards my majors and minors.”

Prianka Hoque is a fourth-year student in Honours Arts and Business Co-op with a major in Communications Studies, as well as minors in Legal Studies and Political Science. Although it appears that Hoque has always had her undergraduate experience figured out, it was not always clear to her.

The past year has presented many new challenges at home and around the globe — prompting us all to be ever agile and resilient. As we close out 2021, we can all be proud of the many contributions made by our Waterloo community to combat the coronavirus and to sustain high levels of education and research excellence. This list of stories — inspired by our quest to develop talent for a complex future, advance research, and strengthen sustainable and diverse communities — is by no means exhaustive, but is a sampling of the tremendous impact of our students, faculty and staff.

While she excelled in econometrics during her undergraduate studies at Waterloo, Susan Shu Chang soon established her expertise in applied machine learning and game development – the two main strands of her astonishing range of expertise in the tech space. Today, just four years since she graduated with her BA Hons, she is a Principal Data Scientist at Clearco, a finance-tech company that provides growth capital for online businesses.

Kathy Hay earned her BA with a major in Psychology in 1998 — but it wasn’t a straight line from start to finish. Beginning her undergrad studies in 1979, she paused university to pursue a career in banking. Nearly 20 years later she completed her degree through Waterloo’s distance learning option. Now as a former banker, Kathy has brought a strategic and business lens to her roles in the not-for-profit charitable sector.

The University of Waterloo’s global hub for eye and vision research is taking on some of vision science’s most pressing challenges through five strategic research programs aimed to generate technologies to prevent vision loss and preserve healthy vision.

The University of Waterloo is pleased to join more than 40 other institutions of higher learning in becoming a signatory to the Scarborough Charter on Anti-Black Racism and Black Inclusion in Canadian Higher Education. The virtual signing ceremony takes place on Thursday, November 18, 2021, from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. ET.

Of all the information yielded by the University of Waterloo Weather Station since its launch as an internet experiment 23 years ago, one non-technical fact is right up there in terms of interesting tidbits.

Frank Seglenieks (BASc ’91, geological engineering; MASc ’95 and PHD ’09, civil engineering), the station’s high-profile co-ordinator, hasn’t actually worked for the University for 12 years.

Six women from the University of Waterloo were named among the top 100 most powerful women in Canada in the annual rankings released by the Women’s Executive Network (WXN). This year’s list includes Clarice Ward, Jacqueline Beckford-Henriques, Suzanne Kearns, Anita Layton, Carolyn Ren and Pearl Sullivan (in memoriam). 

“What I most appreciate about Waterloo Arts is that I got to have so many different focuses.”

This fall, Sabrina Khandakar is graduating with a degree in Honours Arts and Business with a major in Political Science — but her list of accomplishment stem much further than that.

When Khandakar was first debating where to go to university, she was considering Toronto-area schools, but Waterloo could offer her something the others couldn’t — an internationally recognized co-op program that would offer her real-world working experience.