Bachelor of Arts in Honours Arts and Business - Religious Studies

at University of Waterloo Canada

Our small classes create lots of opportunity for animated discussions, while the co-op option offers relevant work experience before you graduate.
In your upper years, an impressively wide range of courses let you focus on the events, themes, or historical time periods that intrigue you most. Delve deep with four possible specializations, or broaden your education with courses from other disciplines.

Whichever way you shape your degree, you’ll develop an invaluable set of skills — technical, creative, critical, and analytical — that will serve you well in almost any career

Today, economists are turning to sophisticated mathematical models to understand and predict economic behaviour. Meanwhile, the problems that come up in economics have driven many advances in mathematics.

That why we’ve created this program, jointly offered by the Faculty of Mathematics and the Department of Economics in the Faculty of Arts.

Over the course of your degree, you’ll become an expert at using differential calculus, differential equations, and mathematical optimization to understand economic behaviour. If you enroll in the co-op stream, you can add paid work experience on top that.

Study the most fundamental aspects of nature in one of Canada’s largest and most innovative physics departments.

Choose from a broad range of courses in applied physics, astrophysics, biophysics, chemical physics, mathematical physics, and quantum computing. Then supplement your learning with hands-on labs and tutorials.

Over the course of your degree, you’ll develop the strong quantitative and analytic skills that industry is looking for. You’ll graduate well prepared for a career in engineering, biotechnology, medicine, or astronomy — or for graduate studies where you can delve deeper into the world of research.

Focus on problems where resources need to be allocated effectively in complex, dynamic, and uncertain conditions.

You'll start with a solid foundation in math, including combinatorics, linear optimization, modeling, scheduling, forecasting, decision theory, and computer simulation. On top of that, you’ll add courses in economics, business, and management science, in addition to the ability to gain paid work experience through co-op.

After first year, you'll choose one of two specializations: Operations Research or Business.

When you graduate, you’ll have all kinds of career options. You might enhance scheduling for airline crews and sports games, improve production and distribution efficiency for manufacturing companies, increase service quality and efficiency in healthcare administration, or develop sophisticated tools for finance and investments.

What is co-op?
Co-op lets you explore careers and gain paid work experience while earning your university degree. What could be better than that?! As a co-op student at Waterloo, you’ll normally alternate between four months in school and four months as a full-time employee of the organization you're working for. It's an amazing way to learn to successfully interview for jobs, see how your degree relates to real-life problems, graduate with up to two years of valuable experience – and make money!

If your passions don’t fit neatly into a traditional university program, consider Knowledge Integration (KI).

The Bachelor of Knowledge Integration is a flexible and challenging transdisciplinary program for creative and diversely talented students. KI offers students the opportunity to explore interests on both sides of the traditional arts and science divide, building their program around a core of skills that will equip them to understand and solve complex problems, communicate effectively, and be able to make a difference in and adapt to a changing and complex world.

In this exciting, highly interactive program (formerly Speech Communication), you’ll explore how our everyday forms of communication create meaning and shape our perspective of the world. This degree is unique within Canada for our experience-based study of verbal, non-verbal, visual, and digital communication practices.

You’ll learn to master interviewing skills, become adept at public speaking, and communicate effectively as a leader. You'll also study the dynamics of communication in your personal interactions, your classrooms, workspaces, in your use of online and digital spaces, and more broadly in media and public communication.

Over the course of your degree, you’ll hone your written and oral communication skills while developing expertise in teamwork, research, visual and digital literacy, and critical analysis — just the kind of skills that employers are hungry for. Enrolling in the co-op stream will provide insights into possible careers and paid work experience along the way.

What is co-op?
Co-op lets you explore careers and gain paid work experience while earning your university degree. What could be better than that?! As a co-op student at Waterloo, you’ll normally alternate between four months in school and four months as a full-time employee of the organization you're working for. It's an amazing way to learn to successfully interview for jobs, see how your degree relates to real-life problems, graduate with up to two years of valuable experience – and make money!

At Waterloo, we offer much more than just German language courses. Explore German culture, film, literature, and linguistics, or add classes in other Slavic languages like Russian and Croatian. The language skills and cultural competence you develop over the course of your degree will serve you well in a variety of careers, including education, business, and government.

Life Sciences is the study of living organisms, ranging from the very tiny world of microbiology and genetics to the physiology and zoology of the world’s great mammals – with plants, botany, and more in between!

At Waterloo, Life Sciences is a group of related majors. The four Life Sciences majors (Biochemistry, Biology, Biomedical Sciences, and Psychology) bring together disciplines such as biology, chemistry, physics, and math to help you learn how living systems work and interact. When you apply to Waterloo, you'll select one of the majors and get to do labs and experiments starting right in first year. You can choose the co-op program or the regular system of study 

Biology
Explore all aspects of life and living creatures – from cells and genes to species and diversity.

Some of the greatest scientific discoveries have occurred within the field of biology, including the mapping of the human genome, identifying the structure of DNA, and how photosynthesis works. All of these revelations happened because dedicated scientists looked at the world a little differently.

At Waterloo, you’ll dive into your Biology major right from day one. And with more than 80 biology courses available, you’ve got plenty of options. From microbes and genes to plants and zoology, we've got something for anyone who's passionate about living systems.

You’ll graduate ready for a career in laboratory or field research, environmental assessment, education, health professions, or industry. If you enrol in co-op, you'll also have up to two years of paid work experience to add to your resume.

Recreation and Leisure Studies represents one of the world's largest and fastest growing industries. If you think about it, anything that you are doing outside of work, school and sleeping, is some form of recreation and leisure.

Here at the University of Waterloo you'll learn from world-class professors how you can influence, encourage, and provide programs and services that help people maximize their quality of life. Whether you're into sports marketing, ecotourism, therapeutic recreation, or event management, the opportunities are endless.

Apply to Recreation and Leisure Studies (co-op or regular) and then choose one of the majors as your "subject of major interest." You'll be admitted to Recreation and Leisure Studies, and then placed into the major you selected on your application when you start your studies in the fall.

• Recreation and Leisure Studies
• Recreation and Sport Business
• Therapeutic Recreation
• Tourism Development

From the ATM down the street to the drone that will one day deliver your pizza, computer-controlled electromechanical systems drive all kinds of technology. Learn to design those systems in Waterloo’s Mechatronics Engineering program — the first of its kind in Canada and one of the top 100 in the world (Shanghai World University Rankings 2020).

You’ll develop expertise in mechanical engineering, electronics, control engineering, and computer science, pulling together know-how from these different fields to develop sophisticated machines.

During your co-op terms, you’ll have the chance to try out different career paths, earn money to pay for your education, and build a résumé guaranteed to impress potential employers.

What is co-op?
Co-op lets you explore careers and gain paid work experience while earning your university degree. What could be better than that?! As a co-op student at Waterloo, you’ll normally alternate between four months in school and four months as a full-time employee of the organization you're working for. It's an amazing way to learn to successfully interview for jobs, see how your degree relates to real-life problems, graduate with up to two years of valuable experience – and make money!