Competition
The Ontario Engineering Competition is an annual event hosted this year at UW, bringing together the best and brightest engineering students from Ontario. Schools have their own qualifiers beforehand, and you would think with an Engineering enrollment of 7339, the competition for Waterloo qualifiers would be riddled with intensity and tons of participation. While this holds true for some of the more popular, hands-on events such as Junior Design, Senior Design, or Programming, the other categories (which are just as much a part of Engineering) such as Debate, Communication or Consulting had as few as two or three participating teams.
Winning isn’t what the OECs are about, but as the “home team” and the most prestigious Engineering school in the country, you would expect Waterloo students to finish at the top and win a majority of events. Not the case, as UW only received marginally more top three finishes then UOttawa or Western, whose Engineering population combined is only half of Waterloo’s.
Not only are we not winning as much as expected, we aren’t participating to the extent that our population and reputation calls for; what is wrong with Waterloo Engineering?
Relative Deprivation
Let us remember that students admitted to Waterloo from high school hold incredibly high averages, in addition to tons of extracurricular participation. They were the cream of the crop, destined for engineering and enthusiastic about their passions. Yet according to the book “David and Goliath” by Malcolm Gladwell, having such rigorous academic candidates creates a school overshadowed by competitiveness, leading to a psychological effect known as Relative Deprivation.
Students at Waterloo rarely think “How amazing! I’m at the best engineering school in the country”, but instead often feel like, “Man, I don’t understands this at all, but that guy over there gets it so easily…” In the face of all their peers, they lose confidence in themselves and become disheartened. That is the fundamental effect of Relative Deprivation: it is human nature to compare ourselves to people around us, and when the people around us are all geniuses acing the course (many times they aren’t, but they seem to be) we lose motivation to strive for excellence and seldom participate in events like Engineering Competitions.
Because we are so competitive within the school, we actually compete less outside of school.
Other Schools
“I’ve never felt a competitive spirit at all,” says Kristina from the University of Ottawa. Her teammate Marina adds, “I love my school, I couldn’t imagine going anywhere else.” They were two third years from Mechanical Engineering, and the only competition they face, if any, is friendly with the University of Carleton.
Rahul is a fourth year Engineering Science student at the University of Toronto, also a very competitive program. He reminisces about his time studying at York University, when his class had less than ten people. “Although I love U of T now, in retrospect I’ve really appreciated York,” he says, “those were my best Engineering classes.”
Recall that Waterloo students could have gone to any other Ontario university; every single one meets the standards set by the PEO. What differs from one to the other are the students, culture, and environment.
Employers are noticing
The effect of competition impacts another, essential human trait in our interdependent society. Jason Lemay, a director from Hatch, the major sponsor of the competition, had some specific words of advice for UW students:
“Students at Waterloo are strong academically, that’s no problem. But with that competitiveness, they lose a sense of cooperation, and with a company like Hatch not being able to work in a team is detrimental. Those individuals tend to have less successful careers.”
Author’s Note
This article may seem very negative, criticizing my own school. But the truth is I actually love it here (there’s an entire counter argument, to be written later), and I care about our program enough to point out some negatives, and more importantly, room for improvement.
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