Waterloo Engineering Becomes WatEng: Entrepreneurial by Design™

Waterloo’s Faculty of Engineering found success in the last three years in rebranding their fourth-year design project symposiums from a showcase of what students have learned over their last five years at Waterloo to “capstone design projects” centred on “innovation”, “entrepreneurship” and other words used by 25-year-old guys who wear Vibram® FiveFingers® around their office. Capitalizing on that success like any good individualistic architect, they have realigned their brand to match market indicators and capture the 14-18 segment of the higher education market.

Starting this September, the faculty’s official name is moving from Waterloo Engineering to WatEng™: Entrepreneurial by Design™. With an initial investment of $40 000, split three ways between the City of Waterloo, the provincial government and the federal government, it hopes to begin initial funding rounds over the summer. To make the faculty more agile and adaptable to current trends, all staff will be relocated to jobs elsewhere in the university on Canada Day, with Dean Sullivan and five professors remaining with the new corporate entity, where Sullivan will have a new position as the Uber Innovation Ninja. Sullivan will be going to pitch WatEng™ at the Velocity Fund Finals in the Spring term, then entering venture capital financing rounds to further raise money. In the long term, Sullivan is looking at applying to Y Combinator where she and one other professor will be going to learn how to bring their new venture from Seed to Startup™.

WatEng™ hopes to pivot from their previous traditional classroom models to a new open-concept paradigm centred around vintage unfinished walls and multipurpose bean bag seating, called Lern 2.0. The class of 2020 will be the first to enter into the Lern 2.0 beta edition, with a final version coming “when it’s done”. Lecture halls will be connected to The Cloud® where they can connect to other lecture halls and use social media integration to deliver new enterprise solutions to the market. This new innovative teaching method will revolutionize the way people learn at the university.

A special residence will be opened purely for WatEng™ students, which will be open to a select few number of people who are the most innovative, and will cost $1000 more than other Waterloo residences per month. Ian LeDuc, a Don in the new residence, says it will be worth the extra cost so that students can have access to the newest video games, special craft beers and weekly speakers who tell them how important and special they are. “We really think our bros will love how we’ve targeted this residence to their needs,” said LeDuc. “There’s going to be daily Call of Duty tournaments, which we finish by yelling at each other really loudly with testosterone-filled grunts to show off how manly we are while we code.” It’s intended that after each tournament, everyone goes together to the gym and bench presses as much as they can to prove that they are “brogrammers,” or “nerds with muscles.”