Chance me for McGill and UBC!

Astrotech
Tue, 20 May 2014 01:55:06 +0000

Sure.

McGill and Toronto are pretty equal / fluctuating in prestige. UBC is a bit less prestigious, but not by much. Waterloo is the most prestigious for engineering, and tied for #1 with Toronto for CS.
I know that Microsoft has offices in Kitchener-Waterloo, Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto.
I am not sure about Facebook, but you can probably find that on their website.
Google’s three Canadian offices are in Kitchener-Waterloo (I believe that this is their main one), Montreal and Toronto.
It would be my guess that they recruit at the universities, but don’t hold me accountable on this. Most CS students will go on to work at companies like these, both during their education and after their education.
Toronto, Vancouver and KW have Twitter offices.
Vancouver is home to the headquarters of Hoot Suite, which is very popular in the eyes of companies.
Waterloo is sometimes thought of as Canada’s Silicon Valley, and is home to many startups. Waterloo is also home to Blackberry, but…

Anyway, you can’t go wrong with McGill. Montreal is a huge, cosmopolitan, financial and world city. It is home to many startups and tech offices with many opportunities for those in CS. You should check the websites of your favourite companies to see if they have locations or do recruiting where you’re interested.

Finally, here are the Canadian schools ranked for CS (for those in the top 200 worldwide) by QS. I know that rankings aren’t really reliable, but they are of some accuracy for subjects and this should be used to give you an idea:

Canadian Rank / World Rank / School


(19) University of Toronto (Toronto, ON)
(24) University of Waterloo (Waterloo, ON)
(41) University of British Columbia (Vancouver, BC)
(51-100) McGill (Montreal, QC)
(101-150) Simon Fraser University (Van. Area / Burnaby, BC) [Not of as much prestige as the others ranked.]
(101-150) Universite de Montreal (Montreal, QC) [French University]
(151-200) University of Alberta (Edmonton, AB)
(151-200) University of Calgary (Calgary, AB)
[Alberta’s economy is doing the best, but it is only home to two Microsoft offices.]


McMaster (Hamilton), Queen’s (Kingston) and Western (London) would likely follow (all in Ontario, near tech offices), but they are not in the top 200 worldwide.

Canada:
QS World University Rankings for Computer Science and Information Systems 2014 | Top Universities;

North America:
QS World University Rankings for Computer Science and Information Systems 2014 | Top Universities;

Global:
QS World University Rankings for Computer Science and Information Systems 2014 | Top Universities;

Happy applying!

[Edits: Added Waterloo to prestige, added links to rankings, both for Canada and in context of North America and all universities.]