I know there's a lot of people deciding where to head off next year and it is a tough choice. I hope I can help by answering any questions anyone has about my experience and thoughts on the university for CS.

Shoot away.

1. I think I love it, had a really great year and learned a lot. Though I believe I would have liked UW Soft. Engineering better!
2. I took the requirments CSC108, CSC148, CSC165, MAT135, MAT136. For electives I took ECO100Y, GER100Y, and TBB199H1. Adds up to 5.0 credits
3. Well not all my marks are out yet, so far 4.0 GPA (meaning I got at least 85 each course). The course averages are usually C+ (there's no actually number posted, they post the letter grade for final course averages) and are always designed to be this way..at least for large first year classes.

Financial reasons actually, didn't really have a choice there. Though I figure I could have pulled off some student loans from one of the big banks and made it work.
Also my admission average was 86.6% for all of them. If I can remember correctly (this being my marks from 1st semester). My supplementary application was pretty good though and the school I came from was favoured by UW.

Some of these may have been answered:

What was your acceptance average?
How much programming experience did you have?
Did you do any of the contests from Waterloo?
if you had to choose based on academic merit alone, which one would you pick?

Would you happen to know what are the job prospects like? Is it easy to find employment?
Have you had any sort of struggles so far?

1. Average already answered.
2. I had decent programming experience through grade 10, 11, and 12 computer science in high school and outside of that I didn't do any programming.
3. Yes I did do some of the contests, but honestly I was very busy around then and it's a faint memory to recall how well I did.
4. Academic merit alone I would choose UTSG hands down. Research here is no joke compared to UW.

UTSG and UW are the top schools for CS in this country and they do produce the brightest students. I actually emailed the PEY office asking about employment when I was applying to UTSG last year here's a excerpt of the response.

"Last year about 65% of Comp Sci students who registered in PEY secured internships. However, many of the students who didn’t find internships registered for the program and then decided that PEY did not fit with their goals, and returned to school instead. While there are no guarantees that a student will secure a position, as this is dependent on many variables, we do post a number of Comp Sci related positions and our Career Counsellors assist students throughout the job search process.
"
(PEY is for 2nd and 3rd year students to find usually 12-16 month internship or 4 months in the summer).

I went to a lot of info sessions for employers out of curiosity in september and I can tell you a lot of companies express interest to higher a lot of students from UTSG. I went to companies like Microsoft (who sponsors a lot), Google, Telus.. and it looks like they hire a lot of math, CS, and engineering students. And I haven't looked for employment in CS since I am taking this summer off to work on side projects and self learn material.

1. Did you take FLC for CS? If so, how would you rate it?
2. What are the materials taught in CS108 and CS148?
3. If one already has some programming experience(like knowing how to program methods declare variables...etc), would you recommend CS108 or CS148?
4. What was your calculus mark and your final percentage?
5. This question doesn't really relate to CS topics, but did you take any of the first-year seminar courses? If so, how would you rate the course?

Thanks in advance!

1. Job field wise ECE and CS are quite different. ECE you learn about circuit analysis , electronics, digital systems..basically hardware end (read this for more info on page 119, http://www.apsc.utoronto...gineering-2011-2012.pdf). Check out the courses you must take and see if you have an interest for them. Later on in 3rd and 4th year ECE you can end up specializing in different fields of study like software design (including low level programming), robotics, and so on (see this http://www.ece.utoronto..../Curriculum_Streams.htm).
But you still have access to a lot of jobs people in CS can do, though you might be slightly less competitive if you don't have a lot of experience programming and want to be a software developer of some sort. Still a good chuck of ECE graduates end up doing CS jobs (Microsoft, Google, big names..) and make good money, but they could also be working with low level programming and coding drivers and things like that since it deals with computer architecture and knowledge of hardware/circuits.

CS definitely deals with more math and theory behind computation. Some of your CS courses could involve more math and proofs than actual programming. But the job field is really booming since CS has an application everywhere from hospitals to banks to tech companies. Think if you really want to be a developer and want to stick with programming/design end of software then do CS because you will not be disappointed.

Don't worry about the professional engineering certification, just do what you find the most interesting and like the most. If you love computers and are not certain you want to go down the path of programming, then do ECE since it gives you the most exposure. Plus you can always switch out of ECE to CS easily, but it's harder to go from CS to ECE.



2. There are a handful of people I know that knew CS wasn't for them and switched programs, but didn't drop out. Refer to my other post above, it's really not that bad as it's put out to be. You can do well if you decide to, but if you want to walk in and expect to do well with minimal work and aren't a genius then good luck. In fact it's the same at most universities because high school != university.

3. Again more bs about this university. I know plenty of people who got like 95+ or perfect in their courses like math and cs and I my self have a decent average as well (had a 4.0 GPA just the other day before my econ mark came in short of a 4.0). Trust me, UW and UofT are no different in difficulty. It is a challenge, but the good kind. You will learn a lot and get the hang of it. Plus like I said before, CS department really cares for it's students (at least in 1st year), they're not there to kick half of us out but instead they (profs and TA's) try their best to help anyone who's falling behind and wants help.

4. Follow your guts. Visit the campuses and get a feel for the environment and see if you like them. Finacial problems I learned are best dealt with at the schools financial aid office since they typically do cover what is left over after OSAP and parents/your contributions (at least at UofT and engineers get insane amounts of cash).

Pretty much sums it up.