At this time of year, applicants have often received two or more offers to a university program so the next step is to decide which one to accept. You could just randomly pick one, or survey your friends and family to see which one is the most recommended. But scientists and engineers tend to prefer more evidence-based and rational methods for choosing things, what is sometimes refered to as “decision analysis”. Most engineering programs introduce this, either formally or informally, at some point because engineers frequently have to decide from among several alternatives. Let’s illustrate it, as applied to the problem of selecting a university offer. Continue reading
Engineering Education
Decisions
It’s been a hectic few weeks with many of our Admissions team working late nights and weekends, but our last round of Engineering admission offers are starting to come out. The OUAC Form 101 offers (i.e. Ontario high school applicants) are posted to Quest (our internal system) and will show up on OUAC soon (if not already). The OUAC Form 105 offers are in progress and should show up on Quest in the next day or two. At this point in the admission cycle there will now be groups of happy and unhappy people, so a few preliminary observations to put it in context. I’ll try to post additional information and suggestions in the coming weeks.
This year we had about 9000 applicants to Engineering. About 5500 did not get offers, so our “selectivity” is around 0.39 (i.e. 39% of applicants got offers). In a previous post about selectivity, our number was 0.44. So it has obviously gotten more difficult to get an offer this year. This is not by design, it’s simply a function of more applicants for a fixed number of available spaces. We already run at the limits of our capacity in classrooms, labs, and teaching resources, so taking more students is not presently feasible.
This year the competition was significantly tougher for the spaces in Chemical, Nanotechnology, Software, and Electrical and Computer Engineering. Mechanical seemed to be a bit tougher too. The other programs were at similar competition levels as last year.
It’s sort of shocking to have to turn down so many good applicants, many with grades in the 80’s and 90’s, and I’m sure they are shocked too. But we don’t have much choice. Too much popularity and not enough capacity.
Interesting Engineering Student Stories
Haven’t had much time for writing posts lately, being busy with admissions, teaching an Air Pollution Control course, and dealing with several research projects. But here are a couple of interesting stories on what our students do outside of class, just to illustrate the diversity of opportunities.
Emily
Emily is a Civil Engineering student with a big interest in entrepreneurship. She has started a company and won several prestigious awards. Her company is not based on what you would call “classical” civil engineering, but nevertheless it involves project management, problem analysis, and creative solutions. You can read more about her and the business here and here and here. Emily has taken full advantage of the entrepreneurship and business training and experience opportunities at Waterloo, such as Enterprise Co-op, CBET, and VeloCity. Her story is also interesting, because she came to Waterloo as one of those very few successful transfer admissions from engineering at “another university”, where she found the student culture was not a good fit (story here). We are glad that she found a good fit and thrived at Waterloo.
Dominic
Dominic is a Mechanical Engineering student, and he has worked in the petrochemical industry during his 2012 workterms. Specifically, he worked with Shell Canada, where his problem analysis efforts (Root Cause Analysis) resulted in $1 million savings per year for the company, and a Co-op Student of the Year award for him (see the story here). It’s not clear from the story, but it is worthwhile to point out that he was only a second year student at the time. Something to point out to those who claim that our junior students don’t know enough to be useful to companies. We’ve always known that isn’t true, and Dominic is just one example. It also illustrates that if you want to work in the energy/petroleum industry, chemical engineering is not the only route. There are lots of roles for other engineers too.
So, a couple of stories that I hope you find interesting and informative. I always like learning about our students’ work experiences, and am frequently amazed by what they accomplish.
Electrical and Computer Design Projects 2013
Continuing the topic of the previous post on Mechatronics fourth year design projects, here is a list of projects completed by the graduating students in our Electrical and Computer Engineering programs. Again, these are the result of the group design experience that is required in all of our engineering programs. These projects are organized by “themes”, such as power systems, music/entertainment, software, sensors, and transportation (to name a few). The list is a nice example of the scope and breadth of things that students in the ECE programs get involved with. I assume that some of these projects are in collaboration with companies, although they aren’t explicitly identified.
If you would like more details on some of those projects, there is a book of “Abstracts” that gives a brief description about each project. Glancing through, I like the naval collision avoidance system (and the helicopter missle avoidance too), the “Watchdog” animal monitor for veterinarians, and the electrostatic speaker design project. But there are lots of others that seem quite interesting too.
Mechatronics Design Projects 2013
Next week our graduating Mechatronics Engineering students present the results of their fourth year design projects during their Mechatronics Engineering Design Symposium. There is a project list with links so that you can see examples of what senior-level students do as their “capstone” design experience. It is quite an interesting list, covering a variety of application areas such as biomedical (laparoscopic surgery and assistive devices), environmental (water treatment), agricultural (egg washing and sorting), and a rather intriguing 3D chocolate printer. There are quite a variety of other things too, well worth looking at if you’re wondering what mechatronics engineering students do at Waterloo.
All Waterloo Engineering programs have similar upper year group design projects, usually selected or initiated by the students, and sometimes in collaboration with company sponsors. The purpose is to provide an opportunity for “real world” design experience, with project management and communications included. In many cases these are projects that are inspired or initiated during co-op work terms, and sometimes they are ideas that the students hope to commercialize after graduation. For high school students trying to decide on a future path, looking at some of these projects can be very helpful in understanding what engineers do, so I’ll try to find more examples in the coming weeks.
Learning to Code – II
Here’s an interesting article from TalentEgg on a Toronto-based non-profit group that runs workshops “for women (and men) who want to learn computer programming and other technical skills in a social and collaborative way”.
Women Cracking The Code: Programming As A New Literacy | TalentEgg Career Incubator.
The group is called Ladies Learning Code, and it looks like quite a fun and interesting way to teach/learn. I can see this expanding to the Waterloo area, if it hasn’t already.
Engineering Careers and Academic Reputation
A new survey and article in the Chronicle of Higher Education looks at the disconnect between students’ criteria for picking a college (university) and what employers care about. Basically it says that applicants who spend a lot of time and effort trying to pick a university with the best “reputation” are possibly wasting their time. Continue reading
Learning to Code
My colleague Dana pointed out this nice little video promoting the teaching and learning of coding (i.e. programming) What Most Schools Don’t Teach . While it seems to be aimed at elementary or secondary school, I can appreciate the sentiment.
It’s not that everyone should be an expert in C++ or whatever. The idea I like is that learning coding or programming develops problem solving and logic skills. the ability to think in terms of algorithms, with inputs, outputs, loops, counters, etc. Even if you never need to code again, that is a useful learning process. Continue reading
Waterloo Engineering in the New York Times
Recently there was a nice article about Waterloo (the university and city) in the New York Times, that you can read here. Overall, it’s quite complimentary and here is a sample of some notable quotes:
“The University of Waterloo…is one of the world’s best technology schools”. “It’s got this amazing university which has long been one of our top three recruiting universities for Google as a whole, worldwide,…”. “Different approaches, rather than money, have instead enabled it to attract prominent faculty members from around the world as well as Canada’s top engineering and computer science students.”
So some nice comments about the quality of Waterloo’s engineering students and faculty. My main concern with the article is that it goes on a bit too much about RIM/Blackberry, perhaps giving the impression that a single company has been behind Waterloo’s growth and success. RIM has certainly been an important supporter for the university, but there are literally thousands of other companies that have hired our co-op students and graduates for many years, and have also been important partners in teaching and research programs. The article says that RIM hired 400 students in 2007, which seems like a lot, but to put it in perspective that is a small fraction of the thousands of students who took co-op jobs in one year.
The article also focuses on IT/communications technology, and ignores the many other areas where students and graduates have had significant impacts, like energy, pharmaceuticals, biomedical, aerospace, automotive, financial, and many more. That’s typical though. The media seems to find it easier to write stories about IT for their audience, maybe because it doesn’t require them to explain concepts in chemistry and physics. But I think that after they have a look, most people realize there is more to Waterloo Engineering than just IT.
Engineering, Business, and Finance
Some university engineering programs have minors or specializations in Business or Finance, or similar areas. Our Management Science Option (like a minor) is available for any engineering student and covers some business and finance topics, but is not quite the same thing. Does this mean that Waterloo engineering students lack business skills and opportunities? No, not at all because the co-operative education model provides lots of hands-on learning opportunities for students interested in the business-side of things. Why take a bunch of courses, when you can learn on the job with business mentors? As I noted in a previous post, there are lots of examples of students starting successful businesses, even before graduation, so it clearly seems to be working.
Then there is a recent story about a Systems Design Engineering student working with Manulife Financial, and her experience as a project manager in a large complex finanical company. It reminds me that I’ve been told quite a few Systems Design Engineering students get co-op jobs in the financial industry. I guess their problem solving and analytical skills dealing with complex systems serve them well in those jobs. Just another example of how an engineering education can be a solid basis for careers in all sorts of unexpected places.
A Professor in Waterloo Engineering 