University of Waterloo Software Engineering 2018 Class Profile
After studying 5 years of software engineering, I’ve learned that there’s no such thing as “too much documentation”. As many software engineers would agree, documentation is considered a best practice.
Inspired by the Systems Design Engineering 2017 Class Profile, the Software Engineering Class of 2018 worked together to compile our data to document who we were and who we’ve become. We also wanted a deeper understanding of the factors that brought students to where they are today, whether it’s how many side projects they’ve built or their family backgrounds.
In collaboration with the Software Engineering faculty, we’ve put together this data into a comprehensive class profile with 113 (out of 141) students. Check out the highlights below, or click here to view the full version.
Co-op opened many doors for students
As seen in the visualization, a large fraction of the class had the opportunity to work for well known tech companies such as Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and so much more!
Some students also used their co-op terms to explore different career paths, such as product design and data science. John Salaveria, an avid illustrator and fashion blogger, leveraged his software engineering experience with his design interests to join a “community of [product] designers with passions similar to [his] own.”
65% of students are graduating debt-free.
Thanks to co-op, most students were able to finance their university education. It’s important to note that there were students from each family income bracket who graduated debt-free. Among those who graduated in debt, 85% of them had less than $30,000 of debt.
By the last co-op term, salaries tripled in comparison to the first.
Students can only hope that this trend continues and that their salary triples again in 5 years. Who knows? (…it probably won’t happen)
Obviously, students have more experience in their later terms, making them eligible for higher paying jobs. However, other factors help explain this increase, mainly higher living costs. Employers compensate for higher living costs with housing stipends. For example, San Francisco housing typically costs $1,500-$2,500 USD a month, which is enough to cover a full 4 months in Waterloo.
Good grades do not imply higher job pay
There was no correlation found between grades and co-op salary. This finding is applicable to all co-op jobs. Instead, there are more important factors that affect job pay such as side projects, extracurricular activities, and previous relevant experience.
Learn more!
If you enjoyed these highlights, there’s a lot more content like this! You can view the full class profile at: classprofile.andyzhang.net and read content covering co-op, student background, school, program outcome, and what’s next for students.
I hope you enjoy reading our class profile! Let me know what you think in the comments, or drop me a line at andy.zhang@edu.uwaterloo.ca.
Important note: (July 28, 2018) Some numbers were corrected after discovering an inconsistency in the data; impacts were at most 5% except for the max salary numbers, which changed from 20k to 16k.
