The David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science is largest academic computer science research centre in Canada, ranking 10th in North America and 31st in the world. (Source, 2023)
The following is an except one of our previous tutors Joon wrote in 2019 for future students aiming to get into the University of Waterloo’s Computer Science Program.
“I didn’t have to write a supplementary essay for any of my university applications, but for Waterloo and Queen’s, I had to fill in a supplementary form, Admissions Information Form and Personal Statement of Experience, respectively. These supplementary forms consisted of listing out awards, extracurricular activities, jobs, as well as writing a short paragraph on some extracurricular and why I’m interested in applying to the school and that particular program.
For students interested in applying to Waterloo ComputerScience, I would recommend aiming for a 95%+ average.
In addition, I would strongly recommend writing all of the Waterloo Math and Computer Science Contests (https://cemc.uwaterloo.ca/contests/contests.html). The Canadian Senior Mathematics Contests, Canadian Computing Competition, and Euclid are especially important as performing well can give a significant boost to an application as well as possibly being awarded a mathematics entrance scholarship ($1,000 – $10,000).
Note that Waterloo prefers participation and performing poorly over not participation so applications should not worry about a poor score hurting their application. Writing other contests such as the Canadian Open Mathematics Challenge, American Mathematics Competitions, and USA Computing Olympiad are also a nice addition to the supplementary. I recommend using DMOJ (https://dmoj.ca/) to prepare for computingscience contests and looking at past mathematics contests (https://cemc.uwaterloo.ca/contests/past_contests.html) to prepare for mathematics contests.
Waterloo also prefers applicants with extracurricular and job experience as it often reflects well-roundness and employability in the individual. I would strongly recommend being involved in multiple clubs, have executive/leadership positions in the club, or even starting a club. For jobs, computerscience and tech-related jobs are prefers, but any jobs is a nice addition to the supplementary. Attending Hackathons and maintaining side projects on GitHub is also nice as it shows Waterloo that you have significant experience in computerscience.
An engineering professor at Waterloo also has a number of posts on his blog (https://profbillanderson.com/) regarding application processes at Waterloo. While his blogs mostly talk about admissions in the engineering department, it should be really similar to admissions for ComputerScience (Math Department).
Hope this helps!”
