akashVaswani

The thing with the university of waterloo is the opportunity for where you coop. How many people at UOttawa get jobs with Facebook, google, apple, MS, twitter and various startups in the valley with jobs paying in excess of $30 an hour?

To give you an idea of how popular UW is in the valley, right now apple has 50~ interns, about 35~ of which are from Waterloo, and a couple from BC. The rest are from the states. And this is the case in many of the companies down here.

"In terms of defraying tuition costs, I figured earned salary was about equal between the two options (4-5 Waterloo co-op terms == 1 UofT PEY term)."

I can see why you would assume that, but that is not the case. With PEY, you get 16 months of work, with coop you get 24. That right that there is 1.5 times the pay. Now take into account that employers look at previous work experience and no. of years in uni to determine pay, and what you get is a constantly increasing pay wage for coop. My first coop job paid me $18 an hour, my current one pays me $35 an hour. Most PEY students who get their first job after 2nd year get $22 an hour salaries (which is how much I made in job 2), with a raise halfway through the term to maybe $23/$24 (around what most people make in job 3). This means that for the remaining 3 coops, you are making money at a much higher rate.

Additionally, what you miss out on in PEY is the opportunity to jump around. You get an offer at one company and you stay there, or maybe yo switch to another company in 8 months. So you might be stuck doing QA for the entire length of the job. With coop, you keep getting a raise in terms of responsibility.

The one good thing about PEY is that you can, as you mentioned, work on longer term projects. But with coop, you do have that option as well if you go back for multiple terms at the same company and work part time while in school.