After speaking with June, you truly get a sense of how much she has contributed to Waterloo Engineering and that this place just wouldn’t be the same without her. She has some of the best stories about engineering students that I have ever heard.
The following article is a small sampling of June’s favourite UW memories and a little background information on June Lowe, the legend herself.
June started in Waterloo taking a grad course after receiving her undergrad in Math and Physics. She became a teaching assistant for the Engineering faculty and hasn’t looked back. In 1975, June received the distinguishing teaching award for her outstanding achievements in the education sector. She is a programming master and even worked as the academic advisor for the committee that wrote the C language!
If you have ever been a student, teaching assistant or colleague of June’s, you know of the notorious strawberry daiquiri she hosts each summer. They have been an annual event since the mid ‘80s. A day soccer, volleyball, potato guns, swimming, barbeque and cribbage is topped off by wonderful beverages. The record number of people in attendance was 108 people with a maximum of 35L of strawberry daiquiri consumed in total.
When asked how she puts up with us, June says “there is always something stupid and different that makes it fun!” There have been a lot of pranks involving June over the years. Back in the ‘80s, June lent out some screw drivers to a bunch of “honest” students. The next day, the first day of classes in the fall term, all of the room numbers in the engineering buildings were mixed around. She was waiting in the WEEF lab for first year students to arrive for their very first class and was surprised to find about 100 students piling into the first floor men’s washroom instead. After a great deal of convincing, June managed to herd the students back into the WEEF lab.
On another occasion, June left campus late one night to find her motorcycle chained to 50 other bikes, leaving her completely stranded and forced to walk all the way home. And anyone who has been in the WEEF lab in the past few years has seen the giant rasterbated portrait of June up on the wall. A number of TAs did that years ago, printing the pages off in secret to surprise her. All in all, we are extremely lucky June has put up with us students for the past 40 years. Please don’t retire until I graduate, June! Waterloo Engineering would be much less fun without you around.
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