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Why Do Graduate School at the University of Toronto?

Quality of Research
Since I am working in the areas of Computer Engineering and Electronics, I know that we are one of the top schools in North America. In fact, an external review of the department in 1994 ranked us in the top ten in North America, just behind the top five schools (MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Illinois, Michigan). This review considered our overall program, including both the undergraduate and graduate programs.

Our work is published in the top journals and conferences. We are also recognized by many companies who use the products of our research, which includes our ideas, software, as well as our graduates. In the areas of computers and electronics, the world moves very quickly, so many of our results are used almost immediately by industry to advance their own research and development.

Facilities
One of the benefits of being at a top university is that we get good deals on software, hardware components, and equipment that cost companies a lot of money. Of course, we do not have a lot of money to start with, but because of our recognized excellence, many companies will provide us with their latest products at little or no cost. They want us to show the world that interesting things can be done with their products. Also, the students that use their products will hopefully have influence on the purchase of their products after they graduate.

A good example are the CAD tools used for chip design. A salesperson once showed one of our professors a statement that said the software we got was worth $16 million dollars!

Lots of People to Talk To
People often feel that being at a large institution makes the place unfriendly and you are just a face in the crowd. This is not the case (see the next item).

An important benefit of being at a large institution is the fact that there are a lot people around. One important aspect of doing research is to be able to discuss your ideas with other knowledgeable people and to have people around who might be able to answer questions or point you in good directions. This is the case with a large faculty. Here our Computer Engineering and Electronics group profs do cover the major research areas in those disciplines and if you happen to need to talk to someone from another area, such as Communications or Photonics, they can most likely give you what you need. There will also be many graduate students that can challenge your ideas and help you.

With a large critical mass, there will be opportunities to do some cross-disciplinary work such as using our chip design expertise to help the Communications group people implement a new ATM switch architecture as a chip.

We have fun too
The graduate students often organize teams for sports like softball to play in the recreational leagues, picnics, outings to the baseball game, or just to get together for some pizza and pop. We also have a very active group that plays hockey on Friday afternoons during the winter, and many of the profs participate. We claim that our hockey group has the largest concentration of advanced degrees in the world for a bunch of hackers! smiley.gif

Here's an example of having fun while we work! We have the best and largest group that does work with field-programmable gate arrays. Our group is recognized world-wide. In the summer of 1997, we held a workshop that was attended by people from about 10 companies. There were a lot of interesting presentations, discussions, and other activities.

Toronto is an interesting place
The campus is well-situated, close to the downtown. There are lots of things to do, and the public transit is excellent.

We're Good
Need we say more?


next up previous
Next: Qualifications Up: Applying for Grad Studies Previous: Why Do Grad School?
Paul Chow 2005-11-03