The Waterloo CS Advantage

This one is for the Canadian monkeys still in high school. It's coming from a Canadian perspective and focuses on Canadian schools.

I'm about to graduate from Waterloo computer science and start full-time at a large hedge fund in the United States. Looking back, I distilled the three main benefits of going to Waterloo:

1) Rigorous technical education
In today's world, not knowing how to code is like not knowing how to speak English. Waterloo is definitely one of the best schools in Canada for a STEM education (STEM = science, technology, engineering, math)
I think there's way too many high school students going into business and other "soft" programs and not enough going into STEM programs. After graduating with both a business and computer science degree, my CS degree has far more value in the market. Business schools leave you with a lot of packaging but not a lot of substance. There's also way too many business graduates competing for a limited number of investment banking / consulting / marketing jobs, while there's so much demand for software engineers that Google/Facebook/Palantir is willing to shell out $200,000 starting salaries for a very limited supply of quality CS graduates. Even at my Wall Street hedge fund we rarely hire pure business school grads. Even the Wharton kids usually have some sort of engineering dual degree from UPenn.
If you think STEM is too hard or you're not smart enough, then you need to stop being a pussy. This soft mentality is precisely why we have too many business students and not enough STEM students.

2) Co-op
You make around $30,000 USD for four months' of work at a top tech company or hedge fund. At today's exchange rates that's $38,000 CAD for four months. Plus these companies usually provide free food and luxurious housing so all that $$$ is free cash flow straight to your bank account. You can do some serious damage on your tuition fees with that kind of money.
Co-op also makes your resume look sexy when you starting looking for a full-time job. Imagine having multiple of the following brand names on your resume when looking for a job: Google/Facebook/Palantir/Linkedin/Microsoft/Amazon/Citadel/Morgan Stanley. You'll be like the hot girl at the bar with employers. The work experience also helps you figure out what you want to do and which courses are most useful, so you can adjust your strategy during undergrad instead of coming out the other end and realizing your degree is useless.

Moreover, past co-op experiences help you land better gigs in future co-ops. Your first co-op in first year will probably be pretty mundane, but every subsequent co-op gets more and more lucrative. It's like climbing a ladder. Let's compare the Waterloo model to the U of Toronto model. At Waterloo, you have six co-op terms which could look something like: random company->government job->Canadian tech->Amazon->Facebook->Google. With U of T's professional experience year, you get one shot and the internship lasts for a whole year. You can't land a sweet gig unless you have substantial past experience, and if the PEY is your first serious job hunt then you can get stuck at a crappy job for a whole year. At most other schools, you only seriously start applying for internships in third year. By then, the Waterloo student would already be at the Facebook or Amazon level. In summary, Waterloo co-op students definitely have much more work experience than most students from other schools upon graduation, and it's a pretty significant advantage.

3) No summers off
This last advantage is a little less obvious. Waterloo co-op students go from study to work to study to work with no break in between. I know most high school kids would get turned off by this because they have some pussy slacker mentality. But over the past five years of undergraduate, I noticed this setup giving myself and my Waterloo peers a gradual edge over time compared to our friends who went to other schools. In first year, the gap isn't that wide, but by senior year, there's a wide gap in the career outcomes between those who picked the more rigorous path and those who didn't.

If you've ever read Outliers, you'll know about the study where rich kids and poor kids in elementary school progress at the same rate during the school year based on test score data. But during the summer vacations, the rich kids get enrolled in enrichment programs while the poor kids suffer from "brain rotting." By the end of elementary school, there's a wide gap in the achievement levels between children from different economic backgrounds. That study made me think about Waterloo and the subtle advantage we received from a study->work->study->work non-stop schedule. The main idea in Outliers is that every "outlier" such as Bill Gates or the Beatles had subtle advantages early on in their careers that compounded over time. It made me think about the sometimes non-obvious advantages that Waterloo offered me over the last few years.