Admission Averages

[rdrake]

Since this seems to be a common topic that's coming up constantly, I figured it might as well be a sticky so a new topic isn't created every time somebody has a question.

So... any interested people can post which schools they applied to, their first semester averages (or half year averages, whatever the case may be with your school). Post additional notes as well and the result of your application.

I'll start.

Schools Applied To:
Waterloo - Computer science.
Ryerson - Chemical engineering, computer science.
UOIT - Computing science.

Application Average:
83% (I think, it's been a while)

Schools Accepted To:
All.

Ryerson - Responded first, almost right away.
UOIT - Responded a week or two later.
Waterloo - Responded a bit later than the others, but still a few weeks in advance of the final deadline.

Additional Information:
I sent in the Waterloo AIF form with a few projects I had worked on and volunteer experience. I think that was all the extra stuff I did. I also had a fairly decent English mark (around 80% I think, I was always lazy).

If anybody else has a question specifically about admission averages, post it here or I will lock your topic and point you to here anyways . Stick any unrelated questions in the regular forums as usual.

[allenh98]

Thanks a lot for this!

[CodeMonkey2000]

rdrake @ Sun Aug 31, 2008 10:33 pm wrote:

I sent in the Waterloo AIF form with a few projects I had worked on and volunteer experience.

What do you mean by projects? Can I send in what I programmed in my own time, and they will consider it?

[rdrake]

CodeMonkey2000 @ Mon Sep 01, 2008 12:36 pm wrote:

rdrake @ Sun Aug 31, 2008 10:33 pm wrote:

I sent in the Waterloo AIF form with a few projects I had worked on and volunteer experience.

What do you mean by projects? Can I send in what I programmed in my own time, and they will consider it?

In my particular case it was Rubidium, a Ruby-based IRC client that Cervantes, Hikaru79, and myself worked on. There's really no way of telling whether or not it would help, but it couldn't hurt now could it?

[CodeMonkey2000]

How did you send it? Did you email it?

I didn't know you could do that, I guess it's good to know. I did spent all summer making a 3D engine in C++ and openGL, at least it didn't go to waste

[changturkey]

How do you guys learn this stuff? Pretty sure they don't teach you this stuff in highschool. Makes me feel stupid .

[rdrake]

CodeMonkey2000 @ Mon Sep 01, 2008 3:16 pm wrote:

How did you send it? Did you email it?

The project? I just described what it was.

[SJ]

Did you do any contests? Do you know how much they would factor?

[[Gandalf]]

For Waterloo any of their contests would factor quite highly, even if you didn't do that well participation is a plus. Other universities probably don't care that much, but it's always something.

[rdrake]

I did the math contests, but not any programming ones. I did ok, not great but not horribly.

[nike52]

SJ @ Thu Sep 04, 2008 6:53 pm wrote:

Did you do any contests? Do you know how much they would factor?

If you're going into compsci, you should do the contests for a while anyways, they are very good training - problem solving, programming skills and whatnot.

[Roman]

Schools Applied To

UofW
UofT

Schools Accepted To

Both

Admission Average

92% or so

Process/Info

I didn't apply to Computer Science per se, I applied to Math, and got early offers (but conditional) for both. I didn't really do any contests, slept through the EUCLID, etc. But I filled out the AIF form. My Calculus average was 87%, Advanced Functions was 92% and English was 91%. I think I would have gotten admission to CS as well, but I'm not 100% sure since I didn't take any programming classes.

Hope it helped to some extent.

[unoho]

hey guys, does anyone knows what's the mininum average to get into computer science and software engineering (both) @ university of waterloo for 2009?

what are some of the course requirements??

also, i don't understand the difference between software engineering and computer science. i want to get into video game developing field after graduating. what should i do? computer science or software engineering?

thanks

[jbking]

Software engineering is a subset of computer science. There are more than a few elements of computer science that are outside of software engineering:

1) Hardware design - This uses more physical elements than software.

2) Symbolic Computation/Numerical analysis - Maple would be an excellent example of the former and Matlab the latter that while there is some software engineering in making these there is also a whole lot of Math too.

3) Computational Complexity - proving that a problem is NP-complete usually doesn't involve writing some software.

4) Theoretical computer science - What can be done with finite automata compared to the automata with a stack compared to a Turing machine.

Those would be my main ones that come to mind though there may be other areas of CS that are pretty much far, far away from programming. In contrast, all software engineering is part of computer science.

I would note that at Waterloo, software engineering can be done through either the Math or Engineering faculties which some may find odd.

[bugzpodder]

software engineering is a cross discipline between the engineering faculty and math faculty. if you like math and theory, go for cs. if you just like to program, go for soft eng (i think its harder to get in since its smaller)