Microsoft Invests in the University of Waterloo

saforrest writes "Say goodbye to independent academia. In a presentation by Microsoft on Wednesday at the University of Waterloo, a new joint initiative was announced which involves the addition of a mandatory course on C# for all electrical and computer engineers. 'Completion of this course will be mandatory for students entering the E&CE program.'" Microsoft's press release is available.

Comments

Academic Integrity

[Baloo Ursidae]

I think the real travesty here is that any corporation could get the university to run a mandatory course about thier product. Where's the academic integrity?

Re:Academic Integrity

[nixta]

Billy boy went over to Cambridge a while back and gave them an enormous grant. Microsoft and the Computer Science department now work very much hand in hand (in a great new campus building), but the emphasis seems to be that Microsoft benefits from the research being done by the CS lab, and gives it a practical channel to reach mainstream audiences.

Before that, Olivetti Research had a lot to do with the CS lab and a lot of that was very fruitful too (see WinVNC for an example).

One of my old supervisors and a nut on language theory went to Microsoft when they came to Cambridge and has had much success turning his research into practice. The underlying language model of .NET has influences from the academic research done at the University (and of course from elsewhere).

Point is, partnership between academia and business can work very well, and if taking a measly class in a language that actually implements excellent OO constructs and principles as part of a computer or engineering course causes people upset, I really think they need to reassess their thoughts on the purpose of those courses. Especially since such a partnership might subsidise the costs of going to college, which is borderline prohibitivein the US. I've seen so many people claiming to know OO that are clueless on the topic and whose code is so very confused that I suspect OO teachers don't understand the principles properly.

I had to rely on Modula 3 and a couple of other languages, and abstract language theory. Hardly practical, but at the time there was no language that elegantly encompassed the teachings. I ended up working with Smallworld's Magik language which had no decent IDE, but which implements some excellent OO principles. C# is the first mainstream language to really cleanly implement these things. Java's not bad, but it's just not clean.

I have my reservations about some of Microsoft's business practices, but people need to see that there is also a good side to Microsoft, and C# is just one excellent example of that.

Re:Academic Integrity

[paladin_tom]

C# isn't by any stretch the best language to teach concerning the basics of computer programming

IMHO, neither is Java or C++.

My school switched a few years back from teaching first-year comp sci in Pascal, to Java. Why? Because Pascal is not a high-demand computer language, and Java is. The downside is that a student is immidiately confronted with object-oriented programming, without first learning the basics of structured programming.

According to UW's story, their introductory course was previously taught in C++ -- again, not the best language for beginners.

I think there's a tradeoff happening here between instructiveness and real-world usefulness. Certainly, C++, Java, and even C# are useful languages to know. However, languages designed for teaching, like Pascal, are probably still best for learning the basics of programming.

Also, I may point out that the article states that the new required course in C# is a "pre-university programming course". This sounds to me like something intended to give students a bit of an introduction to the technical aspects of programming, much like young students may learn some web page scripting before learning "real programming".

This isn't the first time this has happened.

[Xzisted]

I went to school at JMU and the NSA actually has a small office there. I know more than a 'few' people who have been recruited directly out of there into the black world. They funded some of the CS and ISAT dept. there and had some core curriculum additions made. I certainly dont remember there being two Algorithim Development classes being required there before they showed up.

This may be the first time that Microsoft has funded a school but it is definitely not the first time that a gov't entity or corporation has.

why this is a bad idea

[selectspec]

When I connected to the site:

Warning: Too many connections in /home/uws/websites/uwstudent.org/lib/dbconnect.php on line 2

Warning: MySQL Connection Failed: Too many connections in /home/uws/websites/uwstudent.org/lib/dbconnect.php on line 2

could not connect to database

Is this a suprise?

[Herkum01]

Community Colleges that have courses available, are very PRO-Microsoft. The Community College I am going to has,

1. Windows Server XP Administration
2. Windows Active Directory
3. Programming in VB
4. Programming in C#
5. Programming for .NET
6. Introduction to Computers/MS Office
7. Database Programming and Administration/MS Access
8. Networking on a MS Network

The rare Linux, or C++, or C class is taught at night and there tends to only be one class. It is more a matter of Microsoft taking over all computer learning and other stuff is just a set of geeky computer products.

The myth of Waterloo

[AdamBa]

OK, just have to weigh in with my opinion on the exalted status of Waterloo within Microsoft. What explains Microsoft's fascination with Waterloo graduates? Read on (hint: it has to do with the interaction between how Waterloo does it co-op program, and how Microsoft does its interviews).

[This is an excerpt from chapter 2 of my book.]

"Waterloo is considered the premier engineering school in Canada, and is most famous for its co-op program, in which students alternate school trimesters with work trimesters for five years. By the time they graduate, students have accumulated six different four-month work assignments. Some students wind up spending three or four of these co-op terms as Microsoft interns and then hire on full-time when they graduate. "Co-op" and "intern" mean the same thing in this case--one is the Waterloo term and one is the Microsoft term--but because of how the Waterloo schedule works, Waterloo co-ops will show up for Microsoft internships not only during the summer, but also from January to April and September to December.

Waterloo students have a reputation at Microsoft for being the crème de la crème among interns. In fact, for a while Waterloo interns were given special email addresses. While interns from all other schools had email addresses that started with "t-" (to visually distinguish them from full-time employees), Waterloo interns were given the unique prefix "w-". In the world of Microsoft that was high status indeed. Having grown up in Canada and knowing many people who went to Waterloo, I will state that there is nothing particularly magical about Waterloo students. Waterloo certainly does attract some of the best engineering students from all across Canada, but the admission standards are unquestionably lower than at the Ivy League universities, MIT and other top U.S. schools. Waterloo does a fine job of educating its students, but the curriculum is the same standard engineering courses offered elsewhere.

Despite this, Microsoft will happily turn down honors graduates from top U.S. schools, while drooling over Waterloo students. Why is this? It is because of the co-op program. But what is it about the co-op program? First of all, let's separate the students who did co-op terms at Microsoft, and lump them together with students from other universities who did internships at Microsoft. Those students are treated differently from others interviewing--Microsoft does recognize previous work experience at Microsoft as a valid input to the hiring process. One of the main goals of the whole internship program is to conduct extended, real-world evaluations for future full-time employment. If you have worked as an intern at Microsoft in the past and gotten good reviews from your boss, that is considered prima facie evidence that you will do well as a full-time employee and will factor into your interview after college. In fact it may become harder and harder for others to get full-time jobs at Microsoft, because hiring former interns carries so much less uncertainty.

But what about the students who have not interned at Microsoft before? Microsoft interviewers love to hear about specific tasks that were worked on by the candidate, with clear goals and results. Waterloo co-op jobs are great for this, so they give the students much more to talk about during interviews. This gives the Waterloo students a huge advantage over those from other schools, without indicating that they are likely to do any better once they are hired. The real ability they have is the ability to interview well at Microsoft.

I once asked a former Microsoft recruiter what she thought about Waterloo. Her first instinctive reaction was "a top school for technical candidates." But after thinking about it for a bit, she commented, "Outside of Microsoft, I've never heard of Waterloo."

Microsoft used to have a very bad attitude towards universities in general, viewing them merely as (imperfect) training grounds for students. Graduate degrees, with the exception of MBAs, were viewed as a waste of time. One senior manager, discussing recruiting students who were considering graduate school instead of Microsoft, once said, "We fully know how bogus [graduate school] is." This has improved recently (Microsoft now gives grants to schools without trying to dictate exactly what the money will be used for), but the bias against theoretical work and in favor of applied work still remains. Trying to figure out the relevance of a school project during an interview is hard--it is too dissimilar from the work done at Microsoft. Much easier to discuss co-op terms with a Waterloo candidate, and much less risk to recommend "hire" on one. So the myth of Waterloo persists."

- adam

Re:The myth of Waterloo

[Anonymous Coward]

The guys who wrote the Watcom compiler came out of UW. Smart fellows.

Re:The myth of Waterloo

[Anonymous Coward]

You may in fact be correct in your conclusions, but there is no data to support the claims. Here are a few points to consider,

o Time: Over the years entrance requirements have changed dramatically in the Ontario system. When I completed my undergraduate degree only 30% of high school students attended university. Currently the figure is approximately 50% Presumably, quality of students was much better at that time - at all schools in Ontario. Waterloo's reputation was won many years ago. So, qualify your statements with respect to time.

o Stating that the Ivy League schools have more stringent entrance requirements is simply arm waving. Until you can appropriately weight students from various schools your point is meaningless. Further, the requirements change as a function of department.

As an example, if I'm not mistaken, the secondary school students in Alberta consistently out perform other provinces and states in North America. Do the Ivy League schools recruit from a similar population?

---

Do you really think your quote from the Microsoft recruiter has any merit? If you're evaluating groups and individuals apply the same level of skepticism to their intellect. Within Canada 4 or 5 schools, including Waterloo, are widely recognized, though the amount of respect may change with time. [I've been in the system for 17 years at 3 different schools.] It's clear that a reasonable percentage of slashdot readers are familiar with Waterloo - larger sample. Though that doesn't mean that slashdot users are any more informed.

Here's a question for you....What percentage of Waterloo CS, Math, and Engineering grads are employed after graduation? There are confounds within the question but it's a reasonable start.

Without data your long article is pointless.

I imagine I could edit and refine the above, but by now you should realize that your excerp requires a great deal of editing from someone more disciplined.

Re:The myth of Waterloo

[mikec]

Ian Goldberg. I had the entertaining job of teaching second-year programming to him. He answered questions practically before I finished asking them. I eventually had to limit him to, like, three answers per lecture.

Re:The myth of Waterloo

[btempleton]

How many people are as famous as Dijkstra or Stallman? (Not that my mother would know either of their names!)

And how many famous poeple do you know the alma mater of?

A lot of guys from my time at U of Waterloo have done stuff to get noticed. People like Mark Tilden get written about. Ever heard of RIM? Built almost entirely by UW people, and I know their names and went to school with many of 'em, so you might not.

Some for the people who founded Mortis Kern, who were also the people who wrote Coherent, pretty well known in Unix circles.

Know Tom Duff and Bill Reeves? They're pretty famous in computer graphics circles. You see their names on the credits or a lot of movies from ILM and PIXAR. Late 70s waterloo folks again.

Walter Banks, one of the founders of Byte magazine? Scott Vanstone, pioneer in eliptic curve cryptography. (he taught me crypto.) And as the article suggests, though MS doesn't make its programmers into stars, a ton of Microsoft's code is from UW grads.

And you know, I'm not as famous as Stallman but I'm not that unknown myself in the online world.

And this is just the guys from my time around 1980. Lots of other folks after us went on to great things, but I don't necessarily know what school they went to.

Of course, UW is a young school, just coming up on 45 years of age. It got famous for WATFOR when it was only 10 years old. It takes a lot of time and reputation to get to the level of those other schools.

Is it the best school in the world? Who knows, but I know when I started hiring people years later, few I found from various U.S. schools were as good as the friends I had who were the best from Waterloo.

Re:Where's the Problem?

[markbo]

The response of going to another school is so shallow it's hardly worth replying to, but as the comment got modded up...

At the University of British Columbia (where I'm a PhD student) Coke has a monopoly deal -- all vending machines and food sources on campus sell only Coke products. (UBC is isolated -- virtually no off campus sources are available.) So what -- just drink water? UBC has removed/is removing the drinking water fountains from around campus, because of "maintenance costs" -- which is a bit of a joke because none have ever been maintained as far as I can see. No connection to the contract with Coke, I'm sure... My collegues and I currently fill waterbottles from the taps in the bathrooms, and we're just waiting for some nasty disease to ripple through.

Universities fill a WAY larger role in society than job training. Deals like this one erode the functions of independant criticism.

Re:Where's the Problem?

[garcia]

you are right, but in most cases student opinion really doesn't matter.

I graduated from Bowling Green State University this past December. They completed our new student union sometime around then (I really don't remember when it was done, maybe Spring Break). Anyway, this fucking project was funded in part by a large donation from Pepsi Co. which came from the school deciding to go 100% w/Pepsi instead of multiple vendors.

I never have and never will like Pepsi. It's not b/c of them being stupid w/Spears, etc, it's just b/c it tastes like shit. Anyway. My last year or so I didn't have the choice of what drink to have on campus (no, I didn't have cash on hand to buy Coke somewhere else and drink it on campus).

The student body was asked what their opinion was. A panel was formed, they decided, fuck Pepsi and the Union donation, we were sticking w/choice.

The school OTOH decided that 8 million dollars was worth pissing on the students and building a huge Union (with a lot of empty space I might add).

back to the original comment. Yes, they make these deals but w/o really caring for the students. $ > students, always.

Buying the minds of tomorrow

[Anonymous Coward]

This just proves that when you are having trouble earning respect, you can always buy some.

C# is carpsh..

waterloo sucks anyways..

[Anonymous Coward]

On one hand, I think of this as bad precedent, but on the other, I consider this a nice way for Waterloo to burn.

It's an overrated school that used to have a great math reputation and an okay cs reputation, but their politics and nested ties to the large players in the industry has cut back on quality academia. Sure, alot of their grads migrate to Redmond, but that doesn't mean much, does it?

Other lead Ontario schools doing the same.

[Anonymous Coward]

ALL of Conestoga College computers in EVERY computer lab will be running WinXP by the start of this semester. why? nobody I have been able to talk to knows, the instructors aren't really happy, the IT people sure aren't happy (some still stuck on Novell). They are building a brand new building though... ;)

how long until employers complain?

[klparrot]

How long will it be before employers start complaining that their UW co-op students don't know Linux or Java and can't work with non-Intel architectures?

Plus, in my experience, C# encourages bad programming style. I wrote a work report last fall (I'm a UW CS co-op) tearing it apart, but I'll leave a full discussion of that to someone else.

Re:C++ Out at UW

[BigMFC]

So you're going to turn down a student with six terms worth of practical work experience in a variety of companies and actually has proven ability to work in the real world, and instead you're going to hire a student fresh out of college whos only work experience is in a McDonalds in high school? Get real, in spite of all the accusations that Waterloo pimps its students, they come out with a far better looking resume that any other college grads. And ECE150 isn't the only course that uses C/C++.

Not an "additional mandatory course"

[rruvin]

It looks the like "Microsoft is the anti-Christ" brigade is overhyping this as usual.

This is not a case of an "additional mandatory course on C#" being added to the curriculum. This is an instance where the language of instruction in one of the already mandatory courses, namely ECE 150, is being changed from C++ to C#.

This does not make the degree a "Microsoft degree," anymore than using Java in introductory courses (as UW's School of Computer Science does) makes a degree a "Sun degree."

It's what you'd expect

[duncan bayne]

I'm just suprised it's taken this long. In New Zealand, the Government can't afford to pay for tertiary education, and the majority of students seem unwilling to pay their own way - I'm picking it's only a (short) matter of time until the same thing happens here.

Until Governments everywhere bite the bullet and stop using other peoples money to pay for Public Education (an oxymoron if ever there was one), underfunded Universities are going to have to try every trick in the book to obtain funding.

If students themselves paid, in entirety, for their tution, then Universities wouldn't find themselves in the position of sucking up to large corporations in order to obtain money they desperately need, thereby compromising the education they are providing to their students.

Re:Waterloo has the most recognised CS program

[Screaming Lunatic]

Whether you likeit or not, if you wanna make big bucks from sitting in front of a computer, Waterloo happens to be the best choice.

That happens to be a very Ontario-centric, Toronto is the centre of the universe opinion. (Even though Waterloo is not in Toronto) Outside of Ontario, the opinion of Waterloo is that it has a very good graduate program, but its undergrad program puts out spagetti coders.

If your looking for an undergrad, take a look into UofC, or SFU. SFU has a coop program just as good as Waterloo, if not better.

If you're looking for a graduate school, you wanna school with a prof that works with stuff you are interested in. And a bigger school, such as UBC or UofT, that throws a lot of money at research. (Which sometimes involves selling your soul to the devil)

But you state you wanna go to Waterloo so you can make big bucks. Here's a little tip. Do what you like. If you like it, you will be good at it. If you're good at it, then you'll make money.

But if you wanna just make the big bucks, go to Waterloo. You and MS will make a great couple.

Something to consider...

[Quantum Skyline]

Microsoft has been after Canadian universities for years. In my first year at my university, Microsoft held a info session about jobs and stuff like that and introduced a programming contest. The contest was to write a program for Windows CE. No problem, right? Except the emulator (which was free) only ran on Win2000 or NT. To get around that, they gave away free copies of Win 2000, with a free development environment. I still have mine.

This year, a slightly different spin. Microsoft was introducing Visual Studio .NET and gave away free copies of VS .NET Beta 2. Do some stuff (write programs in VS, talk about them, etc) and get more free stuff (Office XP, Win XP, mice, etc). Need Win2000 to develop Web services? No problem. Ask and ye shall recieve. I still use VS .NET Beta 2, learned VB .NET on my own, learned C#, and will try VC++ .NET sometime. I keep my programs for a future application to Microsoft, (despite my dual booting Red Hat 7.3).

Microsoft piloted DevHood.com, a website aimed at students using VS .NET and related technologies with tutorials, how to's, all kinds of neat little things. Students can post their creations, or tutorials. Some of them were damn good. Points were awarded for more free stuff. I used it frequently.

The point? Microsoft wants kids to use their stuff and like it. They want kids to find out how easy it is. C# is easy. But then I've also taken 3 Java courses, so picking up C# was easy.

Don't knock Waterloo too badly. There was a time when I would sell my soul to go there. (I'm not there now). But Microsoft isn't doing anything different. They're just more direct. Most employers that I've been told about want Microsoft knowledge. Waterloo is doing what most universities say they are doing to their grads.

Making their grads marketable.

Re:The Other UW and Microsoft

[Wraithlyn]

"I suspect University of Waterloo is has a pedagogical philosophy more along the lines of a community college and scimps on theory."

Not at all... Waterloo is VERY heavy on theory. It's not rated one of the top Canadian universities year after year for behaving like a community college. You learn theory in class, and you learn practical on your co-op terms... last time I heard, UW had the largest co-op program in the entire world. It's a pretty good mix, not to mention it helps you pay your own way.

Just don't venture into the psych building, or the 6th floor of the math building without a compass and a ball of string, or you'll never get out alive.

the other reason this is lame...

[gerardrj]

Lots of talk in here so far about this is good/bad for Education so I'd like to make another point.

I looked at the numbers in the MS press release and thought: $10 spread over 5 years and across all the universities in the country? How lame? $2.3M for this deal ($7.7M left for the remaining 4 years).

Ten million dollars is equivilant to what, perhaps 4 seconds worth of profit from Microsoft? Consider that Microsoft proper currently sits on $40 billion in cash. If they where taxes 30% on that money. $2.3 million would be due in about 2 hours. This doesn't even get in to their temendous cash flow.

Waterloo isn't just a Microsoft whore, it's a damed cheap one at that. I can understand selling out for the money, but they should have at least demanded $50M per year.