University of Waterloo Architectural Engineering Undergraduate Program Overview

Hi, this is Andrea Atkins from Architectural Engineering at the University of Waterloo, and I'm going to share with you a little bit about our program and what makes it awesome. So the things I want to cover in this presentation are here on this agenda slide. We're going to talk a little bit high level about the program. We're going to talk about the way that we teach at Waterloo, which is very much experiential learning. All the resources that you have available to you when you join us in September at Waterloo in our department. All of the expectations of our co-op system, which is actually a really, really special aspect about doing engineering at Waterloo. We'll talk a little bit about some student experiences, and then I've got a problem for you at the end, which might just pique your interest in why you'd love to join us in the fall. So a quick program overview. So if you're interested in architectural engineering, that probably means you're interested in the design and construction of the built environment. So that might be buildings or bridges or public spaces. It might be a giant suspension bridge. It might be a tunnel. Any of these spaces that people occupy and how we love living there, that's architectural engineering. So in our program, we're going to cover the design and also how it goes together, but we're also going to talk about assessment and repair and refurbishment of the building stock that we already have. Because we all recognize there is a climate crisis, we need to figure out how our buildings that we have, that were built 50 to 100 to more than that years ago, are going to move forward into the future without just demolishing them and sending the waste to the landfill. So we're going to talk about what we can do to keep our buildings going and make them better for future generations. And of course, not every building is an old building being refurbished. We're also going to talk about new buildings and new technology, things that are emerging, green buildings, sustainable building technologies. We're going to be keeping you up to speed, up to pace with where things are going in the future as far as sustainability goes. So our program is a five-year program. So you've got four academic years in five consecutive calendar years, which can be a bit overwhelming when you think about it at first. So here you've got five years laid out in a calendar, and you're able to see what happens in each term. So those yellow terms are your co-op terms. So you can see you've got six opportunities there. We require you to complete five of them. So if you don't get a co-op job, it's not the end of the world. Or if you want to go travel or you want to go do some cool research, not the end of the world. You have opportunities to chase your dreams and figure out what you want to do with your engineering degree on those yellow co-op terms. Outside of those co-op terms, you'll see that we alternate every four months. So fall is September till December, winter is January till April, spring is May till August. And so you'll see every four months, you're going to go transition from school to work and school to work back and forth. And while you're at school, you're going to do some classes that are lecture-based, some classes that are studio-based. And so you'll see the lecture-based classes, or sometimes their labs as well, are shown in purple. And those are our core courses. So all of your AE counterparts, all of your friends are all in those courses together. The blue ones are the ones that really separate us from the other engineering programs, even on campus. And those are our studios. So we have mandatory design studio courses in our own design studio space on campus. So every architectural engineering student is guaranteed a desk in a space with their peers so that they can work on their projects all together and push the design thinking that much further. So every term we're going to be working on projects together in studio. And that's shown here in light blue. As you see, when you move forward towards year five, you are getting into a lot more of those orange boxes. So those are your electives. Some of them are complementary studies. So they might be a philosophy course, an English course, a history course. It might be language, whatever you're interested in. And those technical electives are the ones labeled TE. And those are the ones where you start to specialize. And we're going to talk a little bit more about specializations in a bit. But those are the ones where you might take a lot more about structural engineering or a lot more about environmental engineering. And you can really tweak your architectural engineering degree to be what it is that you want it to be. So our specializations that come out of the architectural engineering program are building structures and building systems. So building structures is the structure that supports a building or a bridge. We're going to include some bridge work in our courses as well. But mostly it's about the skeleton that puts together and supports all of the architecture that goes on in a building. Building systems could include anything about how the building works and keeps itself warm and dry inside. So your HVAC system. Or it could include something like a photovoltaic system or a wind power generating system. We're talking about the new ways that we might be coming across energy for our buildings. But also building systems will include building science, which is sometimes called enclosure design or building envelope. And that's the part of the building that keeps the outside out and the inside in. So everything from that last coat of paint to the farthest edge of the surface of the brick on the outside of your house, all of that would be included in your building system specialization. On top of that, we've got some unique opportunities in all your engineering programs. You've got different options. So these could be from AI all the way down to statistics or environmental engineering. If you take a number of courses in any one of these specific divisions, you're going to get a little bit more specialized in any of those things. So you might have an architectural engineering degree that has an interest in international studies. But your colleague might have an architectural engineering degree with an interest in mechatronics. So they might be talking about robots and you might be talking about policy and how we're going to come up with a solution to a global energy crisis. So you can see how even though you might all be in the same course, the options and the specializations give opportunity for everybody to kind of craft their own engineering degree. So what you can expect in your first year at Waterloo Engineering, in architectural engineering, you're going to see about 20-25 hours of in-class time. So that might be a lecture, it might be a seminar, it might be a tutorial, you might be seeing your TAs or you might be seeing your prof. But I'd be expecting 20-25 hours of that. On top of that, we'll expect that you're doing about 20-25 hours of study time per week if you're an average student. And that is throughout the term. Sometimes at midterm time you might be doing more and sometimes when things are not super busy you might be doing less. It's an average. And what makes us special is that studio course. So you might have 16 hours of lecture time where you are sitting and taking notes diligently. But of that 20-25 in-class hours, about five of those hours are going to be in studio where you're working, where you're dialoguing with your professors, where you're meeting with your TAs and you're discussing solutions to real-world problems with your peers and with your teaching team. So it's a real interactive place and an interactive way to teach. And some terms, depending on what courses you're taking, you could have 9-12 hours of lab time throughout the course of a term. And it depends on the term. Sometimes those labs are in water, sometimes those labs are in structures or materials. We've got a number of really cool labs on campus. So if you get an opportunity to check them out, it could really be that thing that pushes you over the edge and makes you want to join us at Waterloo. Some of the things that really separate architectural engineering from the rest of the programs at Waterloo, but also Waterloo from the rest of the programs that you have available to you in Canada, are that we have design studio. I can't stress this enough. It is both a sweet place to work and it's also the same, we use the same word, to describe our core teaching method. So we're going to be using projects and they're going to be in collaboration with your other lectures that term. So you might be learning about thermodynamics in one lecture and then later on that week you might be designing using thermodynamics and you might be thinking about how you could solve a thermodynamics problem with respect to keeping the heat in the building in the middle of the winter. So we're going to be coming up with applications that are directly applicable to your lecture time and your lecture courses each time in your studio courses. Something that's particularly cool about our architectural engineering and what differentiates us from a lot of the other engineering courses on campus is that in your third year you get to go and you spend two terms with the school of architecture in Cambridge. So our school of architecture is award-winning, it's right on the banks of the Grand River in downtown Cambridge and you will be rubbing shoulders with those architecture students. So we're going to have engineers and architects right in the same building and we're going to be solving problems together and there's no better way to creatively solve problems and to bring together people who have different ways of solving problems and different ways of thinking. So this is going to be a really exciting way to practice your communication skills and practice problem solving with people who think way outside of the box. So that focus on communication is something that architectural engineering and studio in particular is really really pushing at Waterloo. We want to make sure that you are confident in writing, in graphic communications that might be sketching or 3D modeling and we want to make sure that you can give an oral presentation because you could have the best idea in the world but if you can't communicate it to your client it might never get built. So we want to make sure that we are enabling you right from first year to being great at presentations, at written reports, at sketching your ideas and making sure that you have these skills so that when you go for that co-op job four months out of school you're going to be able to say hey don't worry I know how to work in a team and I know how to communicate my ideas. So after graduation fast forward five years and you are looking at a career in the global building sector. So you are not limited to just working in Canada or even North America. We've got positions all over the world which would be just right for our architectural engineering graduates. So you could kind of end up in three different roles. You might be consulting, you might be working on fabrication or construction and you might be a representative of a building or a bridge. So our consulting roles you might be a structural engineer, you might be an accessibility consultant, you might be a sustainability consultant. For fabrication you might be working for a contractor or working on a construction site supervising or inspecting what's happening there. You might also be designing new materials or products or testing them and coming up with the future of cladding. Who knows right now it's brick maybe in 20 years it's going to be a product that you design. And also we like to think that we could represent our buildings because of those communication skills that we have. Because our old buildings aren't able to speak for themselves we often have people who are either trained as architects or engineers or in our case architectural engineers to speak for our buildings. So that means you might be working for a municipality, so that's a city, reviewing department issues. You might be going and reviewing buildings, you might be looking at plans, you might be making sure that everybody is following the building code and following the local bylaws because you will know about buildings and you will make sure that people are safe in the buildings that get built within your municipality. There also are often people with these roles at institutions, so large hospitals or universities like the University of Waterloo have somebody on campus who represents the capital projects. When a new building gets built on campus there is a representative of the University of Waterloo who gets to call the shots and make sure that what happens on campus is up to snuff. I could definitely see a lot of architectural engineering graduates being outstanding at those types of positions. And of course if you don't go right off into your career after your undergrad you could head over into graduate studies. Now at Waterloo or otherwise there will be MASC which are Masters of Applied Science or PhD programs in civil engineering available to you. And I could also see that you might want to go over into a Masters of Architecture program and there are some programs within Canada who would accept graduates of our architectural engineering program. And the research that you might be interested in if you're interested in architectural engineering would be something like material science, new low energy building systems, fabrication methods, design for reuse. How do we come up with a building that can be used not just for what we ask it to be used for today but 50 years from now when we no longer need a library, what are we going to do with that space? How do you design a building so that way it could adapt and become an auto mechanic shop for cool electric cars or where all the robots live? Who knows what the future is going to hold? So we want to design buildings that can adapt to the future. So Waterloo's main big ticket item is that we make sure that you are learning from day one. So we're going to talk about experiential learning now. So our AE program has the benefit of having kind of built in experiential learning possibilities. So for all of our project-based learning that we do in studio, we're usually modeling these things and testing them. So that means you might build, as you see in the lower photo here, you might build a bridge out of popsicle sticks and you might build some kind of cool beautiful building and we want to make sure that we can represent what it looks like at a scale where you don't have to pay out the nose and build the entire building. So we build a small model of it. But what makes us engineers and not just architects is that we want to test them. So we're going to take that popsicle stick bridge and we're going to load it up with a bunch of weights and we're going to see how much load it can carry. And this design to and testing method is very common in engineering practice and we're going to make sure that you experience that all through your undergrad degree. We also have the opportunity to participate, well students have the opportunity to participate in our design teams. So these are industry-funded clubs. So they're not through our program but we've found that our students are particularly interested in the clubs which participate in Habitat for Humanity builds. We've got a Waterloo chapter and we also have participated in a solar decathlon project which is pretty neat. It's a great competition. It's available worldwide and you build a small building. You design a small building and then you have to build the small building and that is when you get to participate in a solar decathlon where they give you 10 different challenges and you have to make sure that those 10 challenges are all met by your little building. It's a pretty neat challenge and it's worth looking at right now. We also have our design days. So this is something that the University of Waterloo is really interested in and our architectural engineering design days is an opportunity to design and construct furniture. So we don't just give students wood and leather and typical furniture opportunities. We say hey here's some cardboard and here's some concrete. Design something and now build it. So our students in the first week of classes are given the opportunity to look at a space, conceive of a type of furniture that might be needed in that space, sketch it out, decide how much material they're going to use because the material is not infinite. They actually have a budget of how much material they can use. Then they design it, then they must fabricate it and of course we're going to load test it and in the past we've taken these benches and chairs and tables out to the yard with lots of sandbags and just piled on the sandbags until the furniture can't take it anymore and somehow some chairs were able to hold up all of our sandbags. 20 massive sandbags. So we've got some outstanding engineers in our midst. So our four programs within the department of civil and environmental engineering are shown here on this slide. So you've got civil, you've got geological, you've got environmental and there's us architectural engineering up in the upper left quadrant and you can see that we all overlap at the hub which is sustainability. We are all here caring about our environment and making sure that it stays in a shape that allows us to continue to live as a civilization, continue to succeed as our community and hopefully thrive going forward into the future. So our architectural engineering quadrant as you can see there we overlap with civil in that we both teach structural engineering. We're more focused on buildings and how it works, how structural engineering applies to buildings and we also overlap with air quality with environmental engineering. We care mostly about indoor air quality but they consider indoor and outdoor air quality in their studies. So our little quadrant up there you can see we're talking about building science and systems. So again building science is what keeps the outside out and the inside in and we're also concerned about the technological aspects of architectural design. So an architect might sketch a napkin sketch but we need to be able to make it work and make it last and of course there's that communication collaboration part which is listed there as architectural project management. So we want to make sure that we can go from a cool idea to amazing drawings to a built building without any hiccups all the way along the way and here's a hint communication is what's going to get you there. So our department resources are available to all of our students undergraduate and graduate and we want to make sure that you know they're available to you because they're designed to help you succeed. We're not going to let you in and then let you fall. We want to make sure that you know that you are supported. So our team includes all kinds of award-winning instructors, amazing staff and technicians. We've got a whole group of people at CEE who are going to be able to connect you with industry for those co-op jobs and be able to give you information about their lived and worked experience. Especially for first years we have an entire program to make sure that you are learning about studying styles because maybe you haven't come across something that's quite like Waterloo Engineering before and we don't want you to fall behind. So we enable our students to learn about problem solving and time management. That's a really big one if you want to succeed you'll have to figure out how to get that sweet work-life balance and of course prioritizing what to do and exam preparation. We make sure that our students have not just the knowledge but also the skills in order to succeed in engineering. So those were our staff support system, our faculty support system but this is our student support system. So we have some award-winning student societies including a student society that's just for our civil, environmental, architectural and geological students but also there's a engineering-wide society called the Engineering Society and these are all student-run, student-focused for students by students and so they do things that are fun and they organize all kinds of events to really achieve that work-life balance but at the same time they also make sure that our students are succeeding. They're not just there for fun, they do provide resume critiques for those first co-op jobs when you just are figuring out what's going to look good on the resume. They bring in people for guest lectures that way you can network with people in engineering or other similar fields. They also regularly organize tours of neat facilities especially for us architectural engineers. We might be interested in seeing a construction site so they offer us that opportunity and they also make sure that our students are looking after themselves and are cared for. So we've got a wellness and diversity promotion team on multiple of our societies to make sure that students are getting that well-rounded experience and you're not just totally lost hitting the books that you are making friends and connecting and making sure that everybody is on the right track. So what separates Waterloo from everybody else? It's those co-op terms. So let's talk about co-op. So you're going to work through five years again there's a different version of that calendar here and you can see that we're going to be switching back and forth in AE every four months from school to work to school to work. There is one pickup in this back and forth and that is in your fourth consecutive calendar year where you will see two academic terms back to back. This is a bit of a change in the system that you might have gotten used to by your fourth year in engineering but it really opens up the opportunity for you to work on a project for eight months straight. Instead of just doing four months of school you can really dig in and exceed your expectations by having double the amount of school back to back. It also allows you to finish on at the same time as all of your other engineering colleagues so everybody gets out at the end of April every year and so there's all the fourth year celebrations that happen between all types of engineering disciplines and it's really beautiful to see. So as you're working your way through your terms you'll see that you are starting out at about $18 an hour and the average wage could be up to $26 an hour. Now that's just the averages from 2019. Who knows what you might be making by the time you get there to that last co-op term. It's definitely not minimum wage and it's going to go a long way towards paying off your tuition, paying for your rent and making sure that your student debt is as low as possible and that is one of the best parts of our co-op and if that wasn't enough you're also getting real work experience and that work experience as you can see on this slide can count for a year of your necessary four years of experience to get licensed as an engineer in Ontario. So the professional engineers of Ontario in order to get licensed you need to have four years of work experience. Well if you've already done all of your co-op terms at Waterloo that could count as one year of experience so that gets you so much more of a head start. So the jobs you might be working on here are some students who I'm actually teaching this term and they're working in research, they're working on construction sites, some of them are consulting not in any of these images but you know that you'll see from later slides that there are students who end up working in consulting so they might be contributing information to architects to design buildings or to design bridges. We also have some public sector work so that's that municipality work so you might be working for a city or you might be working even for the federal government and there's always opportunity for research so it might be on our campus or it might be somewhere else. So you could be working for the government doing research on new products, new energy systems and ways of modifying policy or standards or codes in order to make the future that much brighter. So some of the jobs that our students have had listed here they've had consulting firm jobs so often those are either structural jobs or actually architectural design jobs. We've had students contribute to architecture firms for the last couple years and there's nothing that stops you from going after those jobs so if you're interested in architectural design that's an opportunity for your co-op time. We've also had students work in building performance so that might be our building science experts and you'll see a little clip of a student who participated in that and they also some of them worked for construction companies or regulatory agencies so those would be the testing agencies and the cities and the building inspectors but also building owners and operators so those are the people who want to know hey I own this building I want to make sure that it's going to last another 25 years what kind of maintenance do I need to do in order to make sure that this building does not fall apart before that 25 years is up and so our students have been getting out there and participating in this kind of work and it's been thus far a great learning experience. So how to get your first job we know it's not easy and so you can start thinking about this now and I recommend that if you have a part-time or a summer job that is a great experience in order to build up your teamwork your communication your collaboration skills if you have it's true as well if you have extra extracurricular or volunteering experience if you like to participate I don't care if it's cleaning horse stalls or helping at the veterinary clinic or teaching kids dance or anything really if you are participating in collaborative work and you're working as a team and you're showing up on time and you're there to help out when you need to help out that is already amazing experience towards becoming an excellent employee and I've added here that if you have the opportunity I recommend that you sketch or draw or photograph buildings because if you're going to be joining us in the fall you're interested in buildings so you can start thinking about hey how does that wall connect to the roof how does the water get off of that roof and down into that gutter start looking at it and thinking about it and trying to interpret the way that buildings work that's something that you could do right now and how are we going to make sure that you get that first co-op job and we're going to make sure that you're enabled in your first year of school we make sure that we develop the skills of drafting and sketching so you can see in the picture here the student is practicing drafting and we're also going to enable you not just with manual methods but digital methods so we're going to make sure that you know autocad and rhino which are a 2d and a 3d modeling software and we're going to make sure that you know how to read building drawings because it's very rare that somebody just stands on a construction site and says move this there now put this over there now make that one this size we typically issue large format drawings and that is how the building gets built you have to be able to read drawings to build a building and you have to be able to draw drawings to design a building and the last one there is those communication and collaboration skills you're going to be giving presentations you're going to be doing group work you're going to be making sure that you are able to sell yourself in that first interview so you are confident talking in front of people we're going to make sure that we all get there together so what's our student experience like at waterloo so waterloo has a number of student clubs and societies so these are not specific to engineering these are all across so you can go and meet people in arts or in science or in math and it's a great opportunity to mingle and get that work-life balance so we have student events that are run the one in particular here that's highlighted is engineering day engineers are a proud bunch and we want to make sure everybody knows that we have a good time so that tends to be a really fun event for everybody you also have opportunities to get involved and keep your physical well-being up to snuff there are intramurals and tournaments so you can join a dodgeball team or a stick stick hockey game or you can play basketball or join a volleyball team you don't have to take it that seriously or if you want to take it seriously we've got varsity teams for you so you can come and try out and join a varsity team we really compete and represent waterloo against everybody else we'd love to have you and of course if you're just there for the dancer size then we've got fitness classes as well so i'm sure that there is something for everybody in our recreation center and the last thing you want to worry about because you've got so many things on your mind right now is where am i going to live in september i really want to go to waterloo but i'm not sure where i'm going to live don't worry because residence is guaranteed for our first year students we make sure that you are not adding one more level of stress to your already busy day so we'll make sure that you have a place on campus if you want it where you can be very close to campus a short walk to your classes and be right in the same room with people who are doing the same thing as you you want to make sure that you are not the only person studying really hard no worries everybody in your floor is studying really hard for midterms so you can all pull together so here's a little brief by my student jawad and he is currently in 2a so that means he's in the first half of his second year and he's worked two terms at rdh which is a building science firm so this is that consulting experience that i was telling you about earlier so he worked for two terms at the same firm but because the firm is an international firm the first experience was local in the waterloo office where he got to do some material testing and he got to do some feasibility reports but then his second term he worked for rdh but in vancouver so he was able to go and do some research into uh the assessment of some university campus buildings and some bc houses so he was able to travel and really get some diverse experience even though he worked for the same people both times and it looks like he wasn't always necessarily working very hard engineers are known to like to joke around and have a good time and you can see there it looks like jawad had some fun with some balloons in the second photo so our co-op opportunities are a bit of a breath of fresh air after you've done four months of school which is very intense but it also is an opportunity to continue learning and i know that the more students learn on their co-ops the more they come back and start to share really great experiences with each other so the learning doesn't just stop at the end of a work of a school term it continues right into your work term and you end up actually experiencing way more because of our co-op opportunities so if you want to be an engineer you need to think about design and we don't necessarily think about design in a linear way it's easy to think that you know you come up with a problem or you think you think of some people who are experiencing a problem and you and you empathize with them you think okay what are their issues that they're dealing with okay they also have maybe some sustainability concerns and they also have maybe a garbage dump and okay there are all these things and i need to know what is it like to be in their shoes and then based on that experience you can define what it is that the problem is going to be okay the problem now we we decide and we pin it down that's going to be the problem now once you know the problem you start to design the solution you come up with ideas that's going to solve that problem and then once you've got maybe the best idea you decide to build a prototype and that might be a model so it might just be a smaller version of exactly the same thing or maybe you just design a prototype of one part maybe there's a node that's the most difficult thing to come up with a solution for so you build a model of just a part and not a full solution and then you test that prototype and when you get the results of your test you might realize oh actually this doesn't solve the problem that we set out to solve so we need to re-evaluate our problem we need to define that problem again or you might find actually now that we tested it one of our other ideas might be a better solution so you go back to the idea stage and maybe when you build the prototype you realize that the idea was a little bit weaker and you can make it stronger and so there's these loops within loops that we have in our design thinking which is really what we call an iterative project we iterate we go forward we go backwards we work our way through and we're definitely hitting all these steps but the path that we take to get to the end result is generally not straight and we've generally cycled through several situations in order to get to the best solution so i've provided you here a problem if you're interested in architectural engineering then this problem is probably one that interests you so the example i'm giving you here is called an urban overbuild so i'm asking you to come up with a solution that is a sensitive densification of a historic site so we have a lot of places in canada and even in the united states and all over the world where we have historic sites we have designated buildings or parks or regions as being historically significant but at the same time our population is booming and we need places for people to work and places for people to live and so we can't have all of this low density historic fabric right in the middle of our downtown we don't want people to have to drive to the edge of town to get to their office building so here i've given you a situation you have an existing building that has been designated heritage which means you're not allowed to knock it down and you are not allowed to mess with it a heck of a lot they will get mad at you if you change the look of it on the outside and this existing building has no insulation in it so if i'm inside the building and it's minus 20 outside and i put my hand on the wall it's going to be very cold it might not be minus 20 but it's definitely not 21 which i might want it to be inside and your challenge is to add 15,000 square meters of office area to the site so you're not allowed to mess with the building that's there too much and you have to add a ton more office space and because the owner is very concerned about the cost of energy they want you to reduce the energy consumption of that original historic building by 75 so how do we design an expansion to the structure of this original historic building and how do we design the new facade if we're worried about energy consumption and i've provided you here with a couple of examples in toronto one of them is the queen richmond center at peter and richmond and one of them is 7 saint thomas street both of which have original historic masonry buildings at the base and office towers above and they have found creative ways of integrating the old and the new and without totally disrespecting the historical front that was already at the edge already on the site and they have found a way of coming up with a structural solution because you can't just pile 13 stories of office on top of a heritage building without breaking it so there's many different solutions to this here are a few that we've seen in the city of toronto but this is something that you might see in your experience in your studio courses at waterloo you also might see it on your co-op terms and i expect that in the future you might see it in your career so if you have really enjoyed and getting to know a little bit more about architectural engineering i encourage you to go to our website and to reach out and connect with some of the people there we'd love to hear your questions and answer them we'd love to meet you if we've been given the opportunity and hopefully this has taught you something and i'd love to see you in the fall so come on over to the university of waterloo and architectural engineering i'm andrea and it's been my pleasure hope to see you in the fall