All Posts Tagged With: "University of Waterloo"

RIM founder’s gifts now total $123 million

The founders of Research In Motion (RIM), the Waterloo, Ont. based produce of BlackBerry products, have fallen. But one of them, Mike Lazaridis, is ready to make a new investment. He and his wife Ophelia pledged $21 million to the University of Waterloo on Wednesday. “History has shown us that a relatively small investment in fundamental research in physics and in science today can lead to huge innovation tomorrow,” Lazaridis said. The money will fund chairs in condensed matter and astrophysics, a new science building and scholarships for mathematics students. The couple have donated $123 million in total, after funding the Institute for Quantum Computing and the soon-to-open Quantum Nano Centre. To get a sense of how big those donations are, consider that only one gift to a Canadian university exceeded $20 million last year, reports Academica.

Two Canadian schools dominate competition

Photo by il divino designs (ildivino.co.uk)

It’s one of the most prestigious—and lucrative—in the world. The winning team gets $25,000. The winning individual gets a scholarship to Harvard.

Naturally, teams from Harvard, MIT, and Caltech have won the most titles (55, 40 and 30).

But there are two Canadian schools whose students consistently do well too. The University of Toronto and The University of Waterloo each have 18 team titles and top five placements (Queen’s is next in Canada, with three). Waterloo’s wins are particularly impressive, considering the Putnam competition predates its birth in 1957 by a few decades. But those aren’t the only two Canadian schools to do well recently.

Here’s how our schools stacked up over the past five years.

Teams in the top 10
University of Toronto —4
University of Waterloo—4
University of British Columbia—2

Top scoring individuals (winners and honorable mentions)
University of Waterloo—13
University of Toronto —8
University of British Columbia—6
University of Alberta—1
McGill University—1

Adventure Studies, Space Engineering, Costume Studies!?

UBC Wood Processing students putting together the podia used at the 2010 Olympic ceremonies

From the 21st Maclean’s University Rankings—on newsstands now. Story by Alex Ballingall.

Parents have a tendency to dream on behalf of their children. Sometimes they envision their daughters and sons climbing the hallowed staircases of ivory tower institutions. Sometimes they’re graduating from law school, leaping headlong into medical school, or simply training to take over the family business. There’s no doubt such dreams have merit, but they don’t always mesh with what kids want. Canadian universities offer a staggering array of enticing programs in which students can pursue their own destinies and determine their own dreams. Here are a few standouts:

Continue reading In a class of their own

Expert says eastern schools are losing research race

Edmonton skyline by Bulliver on Flickr

“The intellectual centre of gravity of Canada is shifting west much faster than people realize,” Alex Usher, president of Higher Education Strategy Associates has told The Ottawa Citizen.

“Twenty years ago, you could have made a case that three or four of the top seven or eight universities in the country were in Ontario. I don’t think you could make that claim today,” he said.

Western schools are getting more highly prized funding, says Usher. For example, the federal government offered four of its 19 new $10-million Canada Excellence Research Chairs to the University of Alberta, while Toronto and Waterloo got two each and Ottawa got one.

Although Vanier Scholarships are much smaller at $150,000 each, it’s worth noting that no region dominated that contest. The University of Toronto, McGill University and the University of British Columbia earned 29, 25 and 25 respectively. The University of Alberta got 11.

It’s also worth noting that Usher’s comments come just three days before the provincial election in Ontario, but he is not endorsing any party. None of the three major parties has promised more core funding for post-secondary education, which he said is akin to a freeze over the next four years.

“I am bleak about Ontario,” he said. “This is what happens when you have a $15-billion deficit.”

HESA is a Toronto firm that conducts post-secondary data collection and strategic development.

Preference to those studying Monarchy or Aboriginals

Governor General David Johnston and his wife Sharon have created a one-time $5,000 scholarship at the University of Waterloo to honour the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, William and Kate.

The recipient will be chosen by officials at the University of Waterloo, but preference will be given to a student who is pursuing studies related to the British Monarchy or Canada’s Aboriginal peoples. They will also need to have volunteered and shown leadership to be considered.

David Johnston was president of the University of Waterloo from 1999 until 2010. The Johnstons attended William and Kate’s wedding on April 29.

More information about Their Royal Hignesses Duke and Duchess of Cambridge Award can be found here.

Why a group of University of Waterloo engineers were suspended over a series of bikini-clad pics

Pictures of a bikini-clad woman posing next to a race car were splashed on auto blogs as far away as Italy last week, but not for the usual reason. The woman was, in fact, a mechanical engineering student at the University of Waterloo who had worked on the chassis design for the student-built car, and the dust-up was over the fact that the 20-year-old, and her entire team, had been reprimanded for the “unauthorized photo shoot” in U of W’s lab.

Some students commend the decision. But many say the punishment was unfair and sends the wrong message to female engineering students. (At Waterloo, women make up 17 per cent of the engineering class.)

The full-length bikini shot was a requirement for a charity calendar the student hoped to be selected for, according to Michael Seliske, who took the pictures last month. “She wanted to show that she’s both feminine and capable of working on cars,” says Seliske, a third-year computer engineering student, who uploaded the photos to his blog. (The student in the pictures declined to be interviewed.)

Trouble is, they eventually caught the attention of Adel Sedra, the dean of engineering, who deemed the photos “denigrating to women” and a “setback” for the school. So he suspended the entire race car team from entering the lab until June, which means they won’t be able to prepare for a competition in Michigan next month. It’s a race they’ve each spent 30 to 40 hours a week getting ready for, says disappointed team leader Francis Loh, a master’s of systems design student. “We accept that there was a mistake. But we think the punishment was too harsh.” Many team members didn’t even learn of the shoot, he claims, until they were punished.

The controversy has sparked plenty of debate in the hallways of Waterloo’s engineering building and on multiple Facebook pages. Some students are questioning the fairness of Sedra’s decision, especially considering the fact that the student herself commissioned the photos. Cailin Hillier, of the Waterloo Engineering Society, considers the photographs empowering. “Women should be allowed to wear what they like,” she says.

A similar conclusion was reached by many of the students who attended a forum on sexism in engineering that took place on Waterloo’s campus the day before the punishment was handed down. A central theme was that many female engineering students feel they’re expected to dress in traditionally male garb. “We talked about how female students shouldn’t feel they won’t be taken seriously if they don’t dress like a man,” says Hiller. “But that’s what [Sedra] is reinforcing.”

Sedra says that he’s merely trying to create an environment where all students feel comfortable. “If someone comes into the lab wearing shorts—man or woman—we don’t say, ‘Why are you wearing shorts?’ ” he explains. “But a bikini in the lab? That is not appropriate in any workplace.”

Though third-year computer engineering student Bhavya Khashyap doesn’t think the punishment necessarily fits the offence, she agrees with Sedra’s assessment that labs should be navel-free zones. “That’s not my idea of empowerment,” she says.

UW female students feel unsafe on campus

Female students at the University of Waterloo say they no longer feel safe on campus, due to the actions of an anonymous person who uses Facebook, email and campus election posters to make hateful attacks on women. Student leaders are concerned that the women’s centre and the gay and lesbian support centre may become targets, and both centres have been closed until further notice.

During the Federation of Students elections last week, the attacker covered the posters of female candidates and sent out a mass e-mail, pretending to be the university president, which said “Expose the defective moral intelligence of womankind.”

Some students are fearful, worried that this person is likely somewhere on campus. One student, Jaelle McMillan, was quoted in the Record as saying:

“I feel so targeted right now that I made my stepfather walk me around campus when I had to hand something in. I definitely feel targeted as a female.”

One part of the story that surprised me is that attacking women is apparently not a hate crime. The article in the Record mentioned that many students and faculty are frustrated to hear that even if the attacker is caught, he or she can’t be charged with a hate crime (instead, they would be charged with crimes of mischief and impersonation). At a university-wide meeting that was held on Friday, the director of the University of Waterloo’s police force said that gender is not a category included in federal hate-crimes legislation- ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation are covered, but not gender.

According to an article on the CBC website, section 319 of the Criminal Code of Canada address hate crimes. It says: “Every one who, by communicating statements in any public place, incites hatred against any identifiable group where such incitement is likely to lead to a breach of the peace…”

Isn’t this the perfect example of a hate crime? A specific, identifiable group being targeted in a public place? Some people are arguing that these students are overreacting, however, if this fits the description of a hate crime as perfectly as it apparently does, why doesn’t it ‘count’ as a hate crime?

Satellite campuses abroad aren’t just offering degrees, they’re selling our values

The new campus of the University of Waterloo has lots of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Iranian students, but none from Ontario. You’ll see more hijabs than Flames jerseys at the University of Calgary’s new nursing school. That’s because both schools are in the Middle East—and they aren’t meant for Canadians.

Waterloo’s new campus in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Calgary’s three-year-old nursing school in Doha, Qatar, reflect a new strategy by Canadian universities to recruit bright students, train professors, and build connections throughout the world. These new campuses aren’t just small universities either. They’re mini diplomatic missions. If you ask Amit Chakma, president of the University of Western Ontario, they’re also the key to Canada’s future place in the world.

Under the leadership of Canada’s new Governor General, David Johnston (who was president of the University of Waterloo at the time), Chakma helped oversee the development of the new Dubai campus of Waterloo before moving into the president’s chair at Western. He’s not shy about his ambitions for the school. “The British education system of the 19th century, particularly Oxford, Cambridge and the London School of Economics, influenced the rest of the world,” says Chakma. “It produced leaders like Gandhi, who then took what they learned back to their home countries. Turn the clock forward and you don’t influence the world through your economic or military power, but through your people, ideas and connectivity. At the end of the day, it’s the people who build the country’s bridges,” he explains. In other words, the campuses will help Canadian ideas—and Canadian values—spread through the new relationships they foster. “Think of the difficulties we’re having between the Islamic world and the Western world,” he says. “Why wouldn’t we be offering opportunities of a modern, liberal, Western education for those in Dubai who want to take advantage of it?”

The first two years of Waterloo U.A.E.’s programs (which include chemical and civil engineering, financial analysis and information technology management) are taught by Waterloo professors, who build connections with businesses and potential research partners during their residencies in Dubai. The students, many of them sons and daughters of foreigners working in the Middle East, will spend the final two years on campus in Waterloo, where they build connections with Canadian students and professors. After four years, they earn a coveted Canadian degree.

The Waterloo graduates then make good candidates for admission as immigrants under the new Canadian Experience Class, an immigration scheme that allows foreigners who have studied here to fast-track their residency, so long as they’re employed in the year after graduation. If they don’t choose to stay in Canada, they will take their well-travelling Canadian degree and spread the good word about Canada abroad. “What happens when someone gets a degree from Canada is the person retains their link to Canada all their life,” explains Leo Rothenburg, vice-president, international at Waterloo. “We call them ambassadors.” One day, there will be as many as 3,000 such ambassadors graduating every year.

Calgary’s nursing school offers students from around the world the opportunity to earn a Canadian degree in the Middle East. (Unlike Waterloo’s program, they spend the entire four years in Qatar.) Gail Fredrickson, acting public affairs director for the University of Calgary Qatar, says her school is helping Canada’s image in a region “of growing importance.” She says that Qatar’s people are fascinated by Canada. Case in point: two nursing students who travelled to Calgary were profiled by the local newspaper when they returned. “It was big news in Qatar!” says Fredrickson.

The Canadian branch campuses aren’t just in the Middle East. Since 2005, the University of Waterloo has partnered with Nanjing University to offer the University of Waterloo environmental engineering program. Chinese students spend two years in China before arriving at Waterloo. Once in Canada, the students are offered classes where they brush up on their English while learning everything from how to navigate Canadian grocery shops to how to use the local bus system. Graduates of the program earn both a Chinese and a Canadian degree. After that, about 50 per cent stay in Canada for graduate work. Some stay permanently.

Unlike the many lucrative graduate programs Canadian schools have set up overseas, these undergraduate campuses are not money-making schemes. Waterloo says they have not turned a profit in the U.A.E.—nor is that their goal. Waterloo hopes to profit in a non-monetary sense by providing its Canadian undergrads with the opportunity to study in foreign countries, while still learning from Canadian professors. So far, the school has only provided a few co-op students with experience in China and Dubai. But next year, Waterloo will offer engineering students the option to spend six four to six weeks in Nanjing.

According to Leo Rothenburg, Waterloo has already profited in another way from the bridges it’s building overseas. Waterloo professor Lei Xu was able to develop a new low-cost steel-frame structure that can withstand earthquakes after meeting new research partners on the other side of the Pacific in 2005. After the Sichuan earthquake in 2008 killed upwards of 69,000 people, the Chinese government asked him to help make new cities safer. “Research that happened in Waterloo is being applied to a make houses safer in China,” explains a proud Rothenburg. “That wouldn’t have happened without these relationships.”

Waterloo is getting noticed, too. “I once chatted with a gentlemen in the lounge of Beijing airport who was an official from the Housing Ministry,” says Rothenburg, who gave the man a business card. “He knew Waterloo—because he knew about [Xu’s] work.”

Photo: These engineering students will come to Canada to finish their degrees

Worries that efforts in the U.S. to limit enrollment of Asian students in top universities may migrate to Canada

When Alexandra and her friend Rachel, both graduates of Toronto’s Havergal College, an all-girls private school, were deciding which university to go to, they didn’t even bother considering the University of Toronto. “The only people from our school who went to U of T were Asian,” explains Alexandra, a second-year student who looks like a girl from an Aritzia billboard. “All the white kids,” she says, “go to Queen’s, Western and McGill.”

Alexandra eventually chose the University of Western Ontario. Her younger brother, now a high school senior deciding where he’d like to go, will head “either east, west or to McGill”—unusual academic options, but in keeping with what he wants from his university experience. “East would suit him because it’s chill, out west he could be a ski bum,” says Alexandra, who explains her little brother wants to study hard, but is also looking for a good time—which rules out U of T, a school with an academic reputation that can be a bit of a killjoy.

Or, as Alexandra puts it—she asked that her real name not be used in this article, and broached the topic of race at universities hesitantly—a “reputation of being Asian.”

Discussing the role that race plays in the self-selecting communities that more and more characterize university campuses makes many people uncomfortable. Still, an “Asian” school has come to mean one that is so academically focused that some students feel they can no longer compete or have fun. Indeed, Rachel, Alexandra and her brother belong to a growing cohort of student that’s eschewing some big-name schools over perceptions that they’re “too Asian.” It’s a term being used in some U.S. academic circles to describe a phenomenon that’s become such a cause for concern to university admissions officers and high school guidance counsellors that several elite universities to the south have faced scandals in recent years over limiting Asian applicants and keeping the numbers of white students artificially high.

Although university administrators here are loath to discuss the issue, students talk about it all the time. “Too Asian” is not about racism, say students like Alexandra: many white students simply believe that competing with Asians—both Asian Canadians and international students—requires a sacrifice of time and freedom they’re not willing to make. They complain that they can’t compete for spots in the best schools and can’t party as much as they’d like (too bad for them, most will say). Asian kids, meanwhile, say they are resented for taking the spots of white kids. “At graduation a Canadian—i.e. ‘white’—mother told me that I’m the reason her son didn’t get a space in university and that all the immigrants in the country are taking up university spots,” says Frankie Mao, a 22-year-old arts student at the University of British Columbia. “I knew it was wrong, being generalized in this category,” says Mao, “but f–k, I worked hard for it.”

That Asian students work harder is a fact born out by hard data. They tend to be strivers, high achievers and single-minded in their approach to university. Stephen Hsu, a physics prof at the University of Oregon who has written about the often subtle forms of discrimination faced by Asian-American university applicants, describes them as doing “disproportionately well—they tend to have high SAT scores, good grades in high school, and a lot of them really want to go to top universities.” In Canada, say Canadian high school guidance counsellors, that means the top-tier post-secondary institutions with international profiles specializing in math, science and business: U of T, UBC and the University of Waterloo. White students, by contrast, are more likely to choose universities and build their school lives around social interaction, athletics and self-actualization—and, yes, alcohol. When the two styles collide, the result is separation rather than integration.

The dilemma is this: Canadian institutions operate as pure meritocracies when it comes to admissions, and admirably so. Privately, however, many in the education community worry that universities risk becoming too skewed one way, changing campus life—a debate that’s been more or less out in the open in the U.S. for years but remains muted here. And that puts Canadian universities in a quandary. If they openly address the issue of race they expose themselves to criticisms that they are profiling and committing an injustice. If they don’t, Canada’s universities, far from the cultural mosaics they’re supposed to be—oases of dialogue, mutual understanding and diversity—risk becoming places of many solitudes, deserts of non-communication. It’s a tough question to have to think about.

*This article was originally titled “‘Too Asian’?” For our response to the controversy it has generated, click here.

Former UWaterloo president officially takes Canada’s top post

David Johnston was sworn in on Friday as Canada’s newest Governor General. In his first speech as GG, Johnston urged Canadians to build “a smart and caring nation,” and promised to focus his efforts on promoting families, education and volunteerism. Johnston’s role as vice-regal follows a distinguished academic career, which until recently had him serving as president of the University of Waterloo.

“David Johnston has been driven by the intense belief that service is not merely an option. It is a duty, an obligation of the heart that honour compels a man to accept,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper said. “He holds it to be so whether the beneficiaries are his large and devoted family, the institutions at which he has worked, the wider communities in which he has lived or the country that he loves.”

Source: CTV News