University of Waterloo (commonly referred as Waterloo or UW) is a public research university whose main campus is located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is located on 400 hectares (990 acres) of land adjacent to Waterloo Park. The university offers a wide variety of academic programs, which are administered by six faculties, and four affiliated university colleges. Waterloo is a member of the U15, a group of research-intensive universities in Canada.
The university traces its origins to 1 July 1957 as the Waterloo College Associate Faculties, a semi-autonomous entity of Waterloo College (which later evolved into the present-day Wilfrid Laurier University). The entity had formally separated from Waterloo College in 1959, and was incorporated as a university. The university was established in order to fill the need of a program to train engineers and technicians for Canada’s growing postwar economy. Since then, the university had greatly expanded, adding a faculty of arts in 1960, and the College of Optometry of Ontario moving from Toronto in 1967.
The university is co-educational, and has nearly 26,000 undergraduate and over 4,000 post-graduate students. It also provides a co-operative educational opportunity for grade twelve students in the Waterloo Catholic District School Board through its partnership with the University Co-operative Education Program (UCEP). These high school students originate from home schools in the WCDSB including Resurrection, St. Mary's, St. David's, and St. Benedict's. Students spend first semester of their final year of high school at the University of Waterloo, during which they complete one university course and two high school courses, and work with a professor at the university as a research assistant. Alumni and former students of the university can be found all across Canada and in 141 countries around the world. Waterloo's varsity teams, known as the Waterloo Warriors compete in the Ontario University Athletics conference of the Canadian Interuniversity Sport.
Read more about University Of Waterloo: History, Campus, Faculties, Academics, Ties With Industry, Plans, Mascots, Coat of Arms, Housing and Residence, Notable Alumni and Faculty
Famous quotes containing the words university of and/or university:
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving ones ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of ones life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into ones real life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)
“If not us, who? If not now, when?”
—Slogan by Czech university students in Prague, November 1989. quoted in Observer (London, Nov. 26, 1989)