Tag: Waterloo Engineering

Early Admission Offers

William Bishop18 Comments

Our first admission offers to Ontario secondary school domestic applicants were sent out last week. A few select applicants to Architectural Engineering (AE), Chemical Engineering (CHE), Civil Engineering (CIVE), Environmental Engineering (ENVE), Geological Engineering (GEOE), Management Engineering (MGTE), and Nanotechnology Engineering (NE) received offers. The admission round coincided with our receipt of interim grades from Ontario secondary schools. We have also issued a few admission offers, on a rolling basis, to out-of-province domestic students. We have not issued any admission offers to visa students at this time.

Given our admission requirements, it is generally a challenge for us to give out a large number of early admission offers. Applicants from Ontario secondary schools must have enrolled in the 5 required courses, must be on a path to completing an Ontario Secondary School Diploma, and must have submitted all sections of the Admission Information Form (AIF) to be considered. Fewer than 1 out of 20 Ontario secondary school applicants typically meet these requirements at this point in the admissions cycle. On top of the admission requirements, we restricted our assessments to the certain programs (AE, CHE, CIVE, ENVE, GEOE, MGTE, and NE) and we set a minimum average requirement for early admission to ensure that we would not disadvantage any future applicants to these programs.

All applicants that apply by the official application deadline in January will be fully considered in our next round of early admission which is expected to produce a much larger number of admission offers. Our next round of admission offers will include offers to all programs. It will likely also include offers to visa applicants. We are waiting on further guidance from the provincial government and our university before proceeding with offers to visa applicants.

To help my blog readers get into the holiday spirit, I thought I would post a photo of some cookies that my wife and I baked on the weekend. It is hard to believe the the university holiday shutdown is less than two weeks away. I hope you have a wonderful holiday season!

Ontario University Fair

William Bishop22 Comments

If you live in Southern Ontario, and you are curious about university, the Ontario University Fair is being held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre this weekend on Saturday, October 5th and Sunday, October 6th. Details can be found on the website for the Ontario University Fair.

This annual event allows prospective students to explore the university programs that schools offer, speak with representatives of programs, and learn more about applying to university. We have a large team at the event to answer your questions. The event is also great for younger high school applicants who might wish to learn more about entrance requirements in preparation for future course selection in high school.

This year, I am not attending the event. I am travelling to Chicago to attend another university fair. I will be at the NACAC National College Fair at Navy Pier in Chicago. While in Chicago, I also hope to meet with some of our alumni working in the area.

This will be my second recruiting trip this Fall. Just over two weeks ago, I visited schools in New Jersey including the Peddie School shown in the following image.

The Peddie School

My trip to New Jersey was a busy one. I visited 5 high schools across the state. Our recruiting team is also actively visiting schools throughout Ontario and Canada. One member of our team will be visiting high schools near Victoria BC in a week. We do our best to visit schools that request us to visit them. As you can probably imagine, demand often exceeds our capacity to visit.

Thankfully, we have recently updated our website so that students we are unable to visit can learn more about our university and the programs we offer. In November, we also have our annual Fall Open House where prospective students can visit our school, tour our facilities, and speak with representatives. The Fall Open House is our most important recruiting event of the year by far. Thousands of prospective students attend.

As always, if you have any specific questions about undergraduate engineering programs or admission to these programs, feel free to email enginfo@uwaterloo.ca.

Chances of Admission for Fall 2019

William Bishop192 Comments

Every year, prospective students frequently ask about their chances of admission to Waterloo Engineering.  As you can probably imagine, admission to Waterloo Engineering is highly competitive.  As one of Canada’s premier engineering schools for undergraduate education and as a worldwide leader in co-operative education, our programs are quite popular among prospective students.

Since 2014, Bill Anderson has posted on his blog an easy-to-read graphical version of the information that appears on the Waterloo Engineering website and in our promotional brochures.  Here is a link to last year’s version of the blog post.  Bill bases this information on the previous year’s experience and shows the overall probability of getting an offer of admission given an applicant’s admission average.  This admission average is based on the required courses, usually mathematics, physics, chemistry, and English (depending upon the school, the location, and the curriculum).

Thanks to Bill Anderson, I now have an updated version of his blog post for 2019, based on experience with the 2018 admission cycle.  New this year, some changes have been made to more accurately display the information.  The biggest change is in the assumption that an admission average of 100% should result in a 100% probability of an offer.  When Bill first started constructing these graphs, this was a fair assumption but recent years have illustrated that it can now be misleading for the most competitive programs where there are many applicants with averages between 95% and 100% who unfortunately, did not receive offers of admission.  Now, the assumption (for graphical curve fitting purposes) is that the probability stays constant for 95% and higher and does not approach 100% probability.  With this change, the graph looks somewhat different than those previously posted.

admission-chances

For example, this graph would suggest that of all the Canadian applicants to Mechatronics Engineering with an admission average of 94%, about 60% of these students will receive an offer of admission to their program of choice.  For the purposes of this graph, the admission average does not include any other factors such as work experience, extra-curricular activities, or other distinguishing factors.

This graph is based on the data shown on the Waterloo Engineering website.  As in previous years, programs with similar probabilities are lumped together for simplicity and clearer presentation.  This is based on the actual admission results for all 13,000+ applicants to Engineering in the 2018 cycle.  The apparent decrease in probability for averages from 98% to 100% is an artifact of the mathematical technique used to fit the curves and does not represent any real reduction in probability of admission.

In past years, Bill Anderson used Mathcad to fit cubic splines to the data shown on our website.  This year’s graph was produced by Bill Anderson using Maple, a home-grown Waterloo product that has been in existence for over thirty years.  I recall first using Maple in 1988 while visiting Brock University on a school trip.  I recall being amazed by what the tool was capable of solving on a Macintosh computer that at the time seemed better suited for drawing pictures than solving complex mathematical problems.  I am sure that the modern version of Maple is both faster, more reliable, and more powerful than the version I used so many years ago.

For those interested in the details of how the graph was produced, Bill used the “ArrayInterpolation” function with “method=spline” to get a cubic spline interpolation between the points.  As expected with a cubic spline method, there are some artifacts in the graph that are not actually meaningful.  There may be a better way to represent the data but this approach seems reasonable.

The Journey Begins

William Bishop

Today, the class of 2023 begins its long march towards graduation from Waterloo Engineering.  The road to becoming an engineer is an interesting one filled with challenges, roadblocks, and surprises at every corner.  For many, the journey will end successfully.  For some, the journey will involve detours and perhaps even a few tolls.  It is a journey that will forever change the hearts and minds of our students.

Let me start by wishing all the best to our newest students.  As difficult as the path may be, our alumni would often tell you it is worth the effort.  You will develop friends and memories that will last a lifetime.  You will likely do some amazing things.  You will have opportunities to explore the world around us.  Hopefully, you will find time to enjoy your experiences as you work towards engineering a brighter future.

Life Tip #1: Don’t forget those who made your journey possible.  Your family, your teachers, and your friends wish you all the best.  Remember, they simply want you to be happy.

2018 is a very special year.  Engineering 7 is nearing completion.  Classes will enter the classrooms for the first time on Thursday at 8:30 am.  There will be challenges as all large construction projects have minor issues.  There will also be pleasant surprises.  The Faculty of Engineering consulted students, staff, faculty, and alumni when designing the building.  The result is a state-of-the-art complex with room for both teaching and research.  The building also enables the move of the recently renamed Conrad School of Entrepreneurship and Business to the main campus.  This is a move that is long overdue.

For me too, this is a very special year.  On September 1st, I started my role as Director of Admissions for Waterloo Engineering.  It is a daunting task but one that I readily accept.  The previous Director of Admissions had a very long list of accomplishments as indicated in his blog post on August 31st.  I only hope that I will be able to continue the great work that Professor Bill Anderson during his term as Director of Admissions.  I plan to use this blog to speak to four audiences (prospective students, students, parents, and alumni) in much the same way that Bill Anderson did on his highly successful blog (A Professor in Waterloo Engineering).  While Bill Anderson doesn’t like to brag about the success of his blog, it is the top referring website to the official Waterloo Engineering website and will likely remain so for some time to come.  I will also use this blog as a way of informally providing information and advice about the admission process for Waterloo Engineering.