Yea, I'm pretty psyched right now. I got accepted into the University of Waterloo. Big famous school up here.

It was my second choice because my parents forced me to make a local school my first choice. Im so whipped ;s

The University of Waterloo, also known as "UW" or simply "Waterloo", is a medium-sized research-intensive public university in the city of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The enrollment for 2005 was 23,043 undergraduate and 2,838 graduate students, with 895 full-time faculty members and 2,090 staff. The university was founded in 1957.

The University of Waterloo is famous for being the groundbreaking proponent of co-operative education in Canada and currently maintains the largest such program in the world.

Facts and figures
Math and Computer Science building.
Enlarge
Math and Computer Science building.

    * UW was the first university in the world to establish a Faculty of Mathematics. The Faculty is the world's largest faculty in the mathematical, statistical, and computer sciences.
    * UW accounts for more than $1.6 billion of economic activity (1999) in Ontario.
    * Annually, UW attracts about 400,000 visitors from outside the region.
    * The university is represented in Canadian Interuniversity Sport by the Waterloo Warriors.
    * Contrary to a common opinion, the largest faculty of the university is the Faculty of Arts — not the Faculty of Mathematics nor the Faculty of Engineering.
    * The Computer Science program is currently experiencing attrition problems and has established a group to investigate the reasons for students switching out of the CS program. This group is headed by a former UW grad.
    * On September 16, 2004, the University of Waterloo's solar car team broke the Guinness World Record for the longest journey by a solar powered car. The solar car, called the Midnight Sun VII, broke both the official record of 7,043 km (held by Queen's University) and the unofficial record of 13,054 km (held by Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia) after undertaking a 40-day tour of Canada and the United States, travelling a total of 15,079 km. The tour took the solar car through 7 provinces and 15 states.
    * On Nov 30th, 2005, UW received Gneiss rock which is located at the Centre for Environmental and Information Technology. It measures 9.14 meters tall.

Future plans

The University and the City of Kitchener are currently in the process of constructing a health sciences campus, including a School of Pharmacy, in the central Kitchener warehouse district. The project will cost $34 million for the first phase. Preliminary operations, including staffed medical and optometry clinics, are based out of the former Victoria Public School in Kitchener's downtown.

The Kitchener site is also to host a satellite campus of McMaster University's medical school, bringing 15 first-year medical students to Waterloo Region each year to study. They will remain until the end of the three-year McMaster program, and have the option of continuing as a resident in the area.

The University of Waterloo's Department of Systems Design Engineering recently announced its intention to have a new building exclusively for the department and its students by 2007. With support from the program's alumni, fundraising work began in 2004. The building is envisioned to change the way engineering design is taught. For example, it is planned to provide students with reconfigurable design workspaces and other features.

With donations by alumni and matching contributions from government, the University announced in April 2004 the founding of the Institute for Quantum Computing. [7]

Construction will soon begin on a $70 million building to house the Institute for Quantum Computing as well as the new Nanotechnology Engineering program.

The University is currently constructing a $3.5 million building to house 2,000 networked computers, for use in the SHARCNET (Shared Hierarchical Academic Research Computing Network) supercluster. The building will also act as a direct link between the Physics building and the Engineering complex, and as extra office space and computing facilities for the Physics and Engineering faculties. [8]

The University is also planning a building to house the School of Accountancy; anticipating the move-in by March 2008. The School of Accountancy's expanded space will be constructed between the Arts Lecture Hall, Tatham Centre, and Hagey Hall.

Reputation

From its relatively recent and humble origin, UW has come to the forefront of research in Canada. The University of Waterloo now attracts many bright students from across Canada and is widely recognized as one of Canada's premier universities. It is also known for its longstanding undergraduate distance education programs.
Bill Gates speaks at the University of Waterloo.
Enlarge
Bill Gates speaks at the University of Waterloo.

Waterloo is famous for being the groundbreaking proponent of co-operative education in Canada and currently maintains the largest such program in the world. Due to this, Waterloo has established strong ties with many major corporations. During his visit to Waterloo in October 2005, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates stated, "Most years, we hire more students out of Waterloo than any university in the world, typically 50 or even more." [1]

Waterloo prides itself on its high performance in Maclean's Magazine's Canadian university rankings [2]. The university routinely places in the top three in the numerical Comprehensive ranking, and in the reputational survey it placed first as best overall 13 out of 15 times that the ranking was published [3].

In its article in November 2005 [4], Maclean's noted that "Waterloo is internationally recognized for the unparalleled success of its more than 100 undergraduate and graduate co-op programs."

The prowess of its students in academic competitions such as the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition and the ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest has also greatly contributed to the university's reputation in the last few decades.

The University is also a leader in environmental education. Environmental research takes place in all 6 faculties, with undergraduate and graduate programs concentrated in the Faculties of Engineering, Environmental Studies, and Science. The Green with Innovation website highlights the many environmental programs, student groups, and research at UW.