Co-op education

Who > Where

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The Bank of Montreal (BMO) recently released an interesting survey (summarized here) that ranks the qualities that business leaders look for when hiring new grads from college and university.  Basically, the ranking is:  Personality traits > Skill set > Work experience > References > Degree/school.

Not particularly surprising.  Nobody is going to hire someone whose personality is a “bad fit” for their organization, no matter what their degree says or how great their reference letters are.  Likewise, a great fit with good experience and skills will get snapped up even if their degree is from the University of Neverheardofit.

I didn’t see any details, but I would assume that this ranking is based on an interview process.  How else would one determine the “personality traits”?  So what about the earlier stages of a job search, when employers are deciding who to interview?  I suspect the ranking remains similar but without the personality traits, i.e. Skill set > Work experience > References > Degree/school.  At least, that’s what I usually look for in the hiring I’ve been involved with.

The take-home message?  If you’re working on building your career, focus on the top three things (personality, skills, experience).  For the degree and school, do whatever works best for you and your situation, because it probably doesn’t matter all that much in the long term.  Just my opinion anyways.

Interesting Engineering Student Stories

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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.

Mechatronics Design Projects 2013

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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

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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

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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

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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.

Computer Engineering or Software Engineering?

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Another common question we get from prospective applicants deals with the differences between computer and software engineering (and computer science too).  Since it’s not my area of expertise, I generally try to get one of my colleagues to discuss this in more detail with applicants.  They have also put together a webpage with some helpful information that compares and contrasts these 3 programs.  This is a good starting point, but there are several other things to consider.  I’m going to focus on comparing just the two engineering programs. Continue reading →

Looking for Aerospace Engineering

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A common question we get from prospective applicants is “do you have an aerospace engineering program?”.  The short answer is no, we don’t have a degree with that name.  But it is also an incomplete answer.  Often, students don’t realize the broader implications behind that question, so we try to provide some context for their question along the following lines. Continue reading →

Employment After Graduation?

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The universities in Ontario contribute data to the “Common University Data Ontario” (CUDO) database, and this can be interesting to look at when considering applications and offers.  You can select several universities and a specific piece of data, and do some side-by-side comparisons.  One of the questions we often get from applicants and parents is about employment prospects after graduation from Engineering.  Everyone worries about graduating and not being able to find a job, so let’s look at that specific piece of information for several universities. Continue reading →