University of Waterloo

University of Waterloo (commonly referred as Waterloo or UW) is a public university whose main campus is located in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is located on 400 hectares (990 acres) of land in Uptown Waterloo, adjacent to Waterloo Park. The university offers a wide variety of academic programs, which is administered by six faculties, and three affiliated university colleges. Waterloo is a member of the U15, a group of research-intensive universities in Canada. The university traces its origins to 1 July 1957 as the Waterloo College Associate Faculties, a semi-autonomous entity of Waterloo College (which later evolved into the present-day Wilfrid Laurier University). The entity had formally separated from Waterloo College in 1959, and was incorporated as a university. The university was established in order to fill the need of a program to train engineers and technicians for Canada’s growing postwar economy. Since then, the university had greatly expanded, adding a faculty of arts in 1960, and the College of Optometry of Ontario moving from Toronto in 1967. The university is co-educational, and has nearly 26,000 undergraduate and over 4,000 post-graduate students.