[5] Alumni and former students of the university can be found across Canada and in over 150 countries; with a number of award winners, government officials, and business leaders having been associated with Waterloo.

[16] When Gerald Hagey assumed the presidency of Waterloo College in 1953, he made it his priority to procure the funds necessary to expand the institution.

[1] The academic structure of the Associated Faculties was originally focused on co-operative education in the applied sciences—largely built around the proposals of Ira Needles.

The park was planned to house many of the high-tech industries in the area, and is supported by the university, the Regional Municipality of Waterloo, the provincial and federal governments, and Canada's Technology Triangle.

It sits on the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishnaabeg, and Haudenosaunee peoples that is part of the Haldimand Tract, land promised to the Six Nations that includes six miles on each side of the Grand River.

[47] It is bordered by Waterloo Park to the south, Wilfrid Laurier University to the southeast, residential neighbourhoods to the northeast, east and west, and the Laurel Creek Conservation Area to the northwest.

[48] While the main campus is 404 hectares (998 acres), the majority of the teaching facilities are centred on a ring road in its southern portion.

Built to the west of Burt Matthews Hall Green the expansion will connect all three floors with the Red North corner of the PAC providing social, fitness, study, multi-faith, dining, and bookable spaces for students.

The conflict was not resolved until 1969, when Professor Johnson resigned his position as chairman of the Campus Centre Board, along with his colleague Pim Fitzgerald.

It is a year-round research and teaching centre, which regularly hosts post-secondary student field courses and professional development programs, and also serves as a university outreach facility for the whole region.

[88] The university's School of Environment, Enterprise and Development placed first in Canada in the Corporate Knights 2011 ranking for undergraduate business programs incorporating sustainability.

The financial aid provided may come in the form of loans, grants, bursaries, scholarships, fellowships, debt reduction, interest relief, and work programs.

This includes being full-time, that it is related to the student's field of study, that it lasts for the full 16-week duration, and that it is compensated with at least the minimum wage in the location of work.

[148] In 2016, Startup Compass found that University of Waterloo alumni were the second-most frequently hired in small and medium-sized companies in Silicon Valley.

Waterloo's Artificial Intelligence Institute is an interdisciplinary initiative involving the researchers from faculties of arts, engineering, mathematics, and computer science.

[162] During the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers at the Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology worked in collaboration with SiO2 Innovation Labs to develop a coating that kills the virus upon impact.

[183] Sigma Chi, Zeta Psi, and Alpha Epsilon Pi operate as non-accredited off-campus fraternities,[183][184][185] while Kappa Kappa Gamma, Delta Phi Nu, Alpha Omicron Pi and Sigma Lambda Gamma operate as non-accredited off-campus sororities.

[192] Imprint replaced The Chevron as the official student newspaper in 1979,[193] and publishes a monthly print magazine along with regular online content.

The student union withdrew financial support for the stations' operations in 2008 following several referendums, and CKMS transitioned to a community radio model.

[196] Though it has a cult following, the paper gained worldwide attention in February 2024 after publishing an article exposing the usage of facial recognition in on-campus vending machines.

[198] On February 16, 2024, mathNEWS published an article titled "THE M&M’S MACHINES ARE WATCHING YOU",[199] written by regular contributor River Stanley under the pseudonym molasses.

The article discussed a Reddit post by user u/SquidKid47,[200] who had discovered a system malfunction for an app titled "Invenda.Vending.FacialRecognitionApp.exe" on the on-campus Invenda vending machines selling Mars Inc products.

The program also provides business mentorship to its resident companies and to Waterloo students as well as partnerships with researchers at the university's main campus.

[222][223][224] In 2017, Pitchbook Data ranked the University of Waterloo's undergraduate program fourth for schools that have the greatest number of alumni who have founded unicorn startups.

The yellow background was dulled in 2000, and finally, the original lions were reintroduced in 2010 in conjunction with the attempt to replace the use of the coat of arms with a futuristic W logo.

[233] The red-on-gold lions on the university's arms were adopted from those of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, who defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo.

In 1999, Robert Mundell was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work in monetary dynamics and optimum currency areas.

Examples include QNX operating systems co-creators Gordon Bell and Dan Dodge,[253] Rasmus Lerdorf, the creator of the PHP scripting language,[254] Matei Zaharia, the creator of Apache Spark, Gordon Cormack, the co-creator of the Dynamic Markov compression algorithm,[255] Ric Holt, co-creator of several programming languages, most notably Turing,[256] Jack Edmonds, a computer scientist, and developer of the Blossom algorithm, and the Edmonds' algorithm,[257] Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, and William Thomas Tutte, a World War II codebreaker who cracked the Nazi high command's Lorenz Cypher.

Heather Moyse, a graduate from the kinesiology program, is a prominent Canadian athlete and two-time Olympic bobsleigh gold medalist.

[263] Strickland was honoured for being half of the team to discover chirped pulse amplification, a technique that underpins today's short-pulse, high-intensity lasers.