February 3, 2013 — The University of Waterloo, in a city that people outside Canada would struggle to find on a map, is one of the world’s best technology schools. BlackBerry, the company formerly called Research in Motion, grew out of a student project there, and for years the school served as a reliable pipeline of stellar engineering talent straight into the nearby offices of the smartphone maker. But after years of being a first-choice destination for University of Waterloo graduates and interns, BlackBerry is now a last resort. In its place, American technology giants including Google, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft have more than filled the hiring void.
“Waterloo is different,” said Steven Woods, the director of engineering for Google in Kitchener who earned a doctorate at Waterloo. “It’s got this amazing university which has long been one of our top three recruiting universities for Google as a whole, worldwide […] Waterloo grads do well at Google, they do very well.”
Like most universities in Canada, Waterloo is a public institution with relatively low tuition subsidized by Canadian taxpayers. Engineering and computer science students are required to mix their studies with six work terms for which they are actively sought by employers, including many in Silicon Valley. By the time they graduate after five years, students will have earned $25,000 to $75,000 from their “co-op program” work.
The full news article is available on The New York Times website.
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