Having attended UWaterloo's CS program as well as other institutions, in addition to completing many courses from elite US universities (MIT, Harvard, Stanford, etc.), I've come to an interesting conclusion.
Elite US schools have an unparalleled reputation built upon hundreds of years of pedigree, and as such, there is incredibly fierce competition for entrance. Once you are admitted to an Ivy, the hard part is behind you, and you can get on with your courses. Uwaterloo is the the reverse: it is almost trivial to gain entrance, but surviving the devastating curriculum is another matter entirely.
Elite US schools have the best teachers in the world in my opinion, as the quality of their online lectures have shown. However, it appears that the assessment difficulty is similar to a top level Canadian schools (UofT, McGill, etc.). This is the crucial difference between UWaterloo and every other university.
UWaterloo assessment is brutal. In every way that an assessment can be made hard, it is done so. The tests are purely theoretical, making rote memorization useless. Furthermore, they are very long, putting slow and deep thinkers at a disadvantage. On top of all this, there is an extremely strict system of producing completely new exams and assignments, while making sure previous years' materials are not released. Combine this with an uncompromising curriculum in terms of breadth and depth, and you have one of the most rigorous CS programs in the world.
Now you can argue whether all of this is unnecessary (whiteboard vs terminal coding), but the truth is, the sheer difficulty of the challenge tends to weed out the uncommitted. The reason why UWaterloo grads are humble, is because they have had their egos beaten out of them. Without exception, every UW Math/CS undergrad is one of the smartest people in their high school/town/province. They come to UW, and within the first year, they have a serious confidence crisis as they are failing courses and getting marks they've never seen before (50s 60s 70s).
Once this occurs, they either quit, or swallow their ego and just focus on learning the material and preparing for the exams. There is no psychological foundation for arrogance, as even the best and brightest suffer failures repeatedly.
To summarize: UWaterloo is war. Your morale suffers, your friends fail and leave, and you lose all hope. But the few who survive are battle-hardend engineers by the end.
Unofficial UW motto: "Cry in the dojo, laugh in the battlefield."
Addendum: Co-op terms are a refreshing break from this academic war zone. I was always amazed at how simple, straightforward and fun actual work was in comparison to the ruthlessness of the curriculum.
Addendum II: Couldn't resist adding this hilarious interview with Elon Musk regarding his time at Queen's (another good Canadian school). He decided against UWaterloo, but for entirely different reasons:
> completely new exams and assignments, while making sure previous years' materials are not released
This seems absurd. Both MathSoc and EngSoc maintain exam banks, which students can (and do!) contribute to. Professors release past midterms and finals to help students prepare all the time -- assuming they think they're relevant. (Sometimes they're not -- the accreditation boards and curriculum committees shuffle stuff around every few years to keep up with du jour trends in education.)
All good engineering schools share this quality. If you don't feel "academic PTSD" after being done with your engineering curriculum, you probably didn't go to a good enough engineering school.
Thanks you for depressingly pointing out that Elon Musk is the same age as I am. Unlike Elon however, I managed to find women on the Waterloo campus. It's far from difficult.
As a fellow UW CS grad, I'd like to say this is pretty on the button, except for the fact that I wouldn't say it's trivial to get into as you need very high marks and more, at least in the year I entered, which was the double cohort (grade 12 and 13 graduating at the same time). My buddy had a 99 average in OAC (grade 13) in every math and science course, made top finals in Canada for every UW math contest, and did a whole slew of other impressive things and was still rejected for Computer Engineering, and this was and is still one of the smartest guys I know. Later that summer they did grant him entrance luckily, but it was ridiculous that you needed such high marks to get in. From a CS perspective though, the minimum marks required were like 10-15 points higher than the next top school from what I remember.
UW CS was the most brutal experience of my life and after 1 day of frosh week I realized every one I met was smarter and more accomplished than me. You get the pride and confidence beaten out of you so quick it's not funny. I powered through and hated every minute of it, but I didn't want to give up, I wanted to make it and show the world I could beat UW; it was the enemy. Many people I knew quit or disappeared after 1 year or 2nd year, I wanted to quit, I had many crises, but I brute forced through, clawing to the minimum required average to stay in the program. I was lucky to know at least a few others who were doing the same, which helped me feel not so alone. You swallow your pride and do everything you can to stay afloat, even while others around you take 1 extra full course a term while doing a double major with no effort and you wonder why you are so stupid or what planet everyone is from. We didn't get reading week, we got reading days, sometimes only day. You never got a summer break, only co-op, which was like a vacation compared to school, but it was the most useful thing of all I think. Everything was theory, it was so abstract and real world useless at the time that it bended your mind, this bugged me the most as an entrepreneur. By the end the work isn't easier, you are just better at managing your time and knowing how to defeat the non-stop barrage of assignments. You realize you should make more friends because some of the people that you always hated for having every answer first on the newsgroups, even outsmarting the TAs, was the guy who would be the top engineer at the best firms in no time, or that you can hire them and be unstoppable. The non-stop shifting between co-op and school made it feel like you were doing 3 years of experiences per 1 year, so time felt so distorted and you grew that much faster. Having the courage to move to a new city every 4 months and relearn everything also changes you. You knew what kind of experience having a job was and how disjointed it was from school. You learned what you didn't want to do, you started using your schooling to try and improve work places, and by the end you felt very comfortable with your skills and your knowledge of how the real world works. Pretty much everyone I knew had a job offer almost a year before graduating.
I think anyone else from UW would say the same thing, but during and for years after, being idle for more than an hour or two made you feel really really guilty, like you knew you should be working or making progress, and if you don't lose that feeling, you can accomplish great things very quickly. A weekend of relaxing was more stressful and unnerving than anything. I think most people leave Waterloo after they graduate because they hate it so much, it was so brutal that the city itself becomes an incarnation of what you experienced. It's getting better now, but damn did I hate everything for a long time. I beat it though, and I'm proud to say I survived.
I stuck around in Waterloo because I was an entrepreneur and I knew it was the best place to start a business. I volunteered and ran entrepreneurship organizations, tried to start my own companies and made a huge network. I flipped from hating Waterloo to loving it, and 10 years later I'm still here and running a funded startup. I wished Velocity and the Communitech Hub and all the other great stuff going on now was here back when I was in school, but so glad it's here now. The smarts, determination, experience and energy of these student entrepreneurs combined with the guidance and support of the programs makes for a very fierce advantage.
Elite US schools have an unparalleled reputation built upon hundreds of years of pedigree, and as such, there is incredibly fierce competition for entrance. Once you are admitted to an Ivy, the hard part is behind you, and you can get on with your courses. Uwaterloo is the the reverse: it is almost trivial to gain entrance, but surviving the devastating curriculum is another matter entirely.
Elite US schools have the best teachers in the world in my opinion, as the quality of their online lectures have shown. However, it appears that the assessment difficulty is similar to a top level Canadian schools (UofT, McGill, etc.). This is the crucial difference between UWaterloo and every other university.
UWaterloo assessment is brutal. In every way that an assessment can be made hard, it is done so. The tests are purely theoretical, making rote memorization useless. Furthermore, they are very long, putting slow and deep thinkers at a disadvantage. On top of all this, there is an extremely strict system of producing completely new exams and assignments, while making sure previous years' materials are not released. Combine this with an uncompromising curriculum in terms of breadth and depth, and you have one of the most rigorous CS programs in the world.
Now you can argue whether all of this is unnecessary (whiteboard vs terminal coding), but the truth is, the sheer difficulty of the challenge tends to weed out the uncommitted. The reason why UWaterloo grads are humble, is because they have had their egos beaten out of them. Without exception, every UW Math/CS undergrad is one of the smartest people in their high school/town/province. They come to UW, and within the first year, they have a serious confidence crisis as they are failing courses and getting marks they've never seen before (50s 60s 70s).
Once this occurs, they either quit, or swallow their ego and just focus on learning the material and preparing for the exams. There is no psychological foundation for arrogance, as even the best and brightest suffer failures repeatedly.
To summarize: UWaterloo is war. Your morale suffers, your friends fail and leave, and you lose all hope. But the few who survive are battle-hardend engineers by the end.
Unofficial UW motto: "Cry in the dojo, laugh in the battlefield."
Addendum: Co-op terms are a refreshing break from this academic war zone. I was always amazed at how simple, straightforward and fun actual work was in comparison to the ruthlessness of the curriculum.
Addendum II: Couldn't resist adding this hilarious interview with Elon Musk regarding his time at Queen's (another good Canadian school). He decided against UWaterloo, but for entirely different reasons:
http://queensu.ca/news/alumnireview/rocket-man