University of Waterloo

The University of Waterloo is a public research university in Waterloo, Ontario, founded in 1957 and opened to students in 1959. It was created to expand engineering and science education in postwar Ontario and is defined by cooperative education and by a Faculty of Mathematics that includes computer science. The main campus is a suburban tract in the city of Waterloo, next to Wilfrid Laurier University.

Six faculties cover Arts, Engineering, Environment, Health, Mathematics, and Science. The Institute for Quantum Computing, the Velocity incubator, and engineering laboratories are the main graduate research settings; the independent Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics sits adjacent to campus and collaborates with the university. Engineering, computer science, pure and applied mathematics, and quantum information are the fields most associated with Waterloo.

About 42,000 students are enrolled, including roughly 6,000 graduate students. International students form a large share of both undergraduate and graduate cohorts and come from more than 100 countries. Alumni include BlackBerry co-founder Mike Lazaridis, who later funded the Institute for Quantum Computing, investor Chamath Palihapitiya, and Pixar technical director William Reeves.

Graduate degrees include the research M.A.Sc. and Ph.D., course-based M.Eng. and professional master's awards, and the MMath. Supervision is laboratory- and group-based in engineering and computer science. Some programs retain co-op work terms. The campus sits in the Kitchener-Waterloo technology corridor, and graduate students typically rent in Waterloo or Kitchener.

In the Grad School Navigator directory, University of Waterloo lists 37 graduate programs across 22 subjects: 26 master's programs and 11 doctoral programs, with the widest choice in statistics, computer science and physics. University of Waterloo holds rank 66 in the GSN Overall University Ranking.