Favourite courses at Waterloo

Apr 23, 2026

Now that I've completed my 4A term at Waterloo, I thought I'd compile a list of my favourite and least-favourite courses.

banger courses

in chronological order

F22 with Jeff Stacey

impromptu speeches throughout the course along with 3 big prepared speeches
each class starts with a student-led activity
Jeff Stacey really makes the classroom feel like you're in high school again, in the sense that he makes sure everyone knows each other (and the class size is only 30)
super fun class, and also happens to be useful :)

W23 with Blake Madill

I did not enjoy linear algebra before this, and I did not enjoy linear algebra after this. In fact, I don't even know if I enjoyed the linear algebra in this course. But I very much enjoyed Blake's teaching
Blake's style of guiding the class through topics reminded me of 3B1B: he set up motivating examples for you to try and arrive at the solution, and the whole class felt like a journey where you as the student are discovering new concepts that you would have discovered yourself naturally given enough time

S24 with Martin Pei

the course is split into two halves: enumeration (snore), and graph theory (the reason it's on this list)
the graph theory section was extremely rewarding. proof questions required genuine creativity and out-of-the-box thinking, rather than "apply what you learned in class". the solutions were usually very elegant and looking back felt obvious. banging your head against a problem for hours then finally having an aha moment in the shower randomly was very rewarding. then comparing with friends to find out they did something completely different was pretty cool too

S24 with Simon Wood

music history, but also american history through the lens of music
it's like tuning into a live podcast every week
I discovered more than half my music taste through this course
favourite part was the counterculture movement
between this and MUSIC 246, take this one
fun fact I love sharing that I learned from this course: before all the Billboard charts, there used to only be 3: Race (renamed to R&B), Hillbilly (renamed to Western), and Pop. the way a song was categorized into one of these 3 was by the locations of the record stores selling most records: a predominantly white rural population meant the song was classified as Hillbilly, predominantly black => Race, and urban white population => Pop. these categories always correctly identified what we associate with R&B and Western music, even though the style of the music wasn't even considered. this is also why R&B/Western hits often get crosslisted onto Pop charts, but you almost never see it the other way around

F23 with Ondrej Lhotak

throughout the course, we developed a compiler for LACS -- a subset of scala -- into MIPS
scala was cool, writing a compiler was cool
pretty similar to CS241, except that course makes you write a compiler for a subset of C++. most language features are the same, except for closures/support for functions as first class citizens
90% of your time is spent debugging, so be prepared (I took this before LLMs became smarter than me, this is probably not the case anymore)

W25 with Mark Petrick

probably highly rated on uwflow because it's applicable to interviews, but it's cool apart from that too
I personally really enjoyed this class because at times I'd feel like I'm in a flow state with mark petrick, answering questions and having a back and forth
the content itself was solid, and it was delivered well
tutorials had some pretty challenging problems that were fun to solve, it was also fun to attend the tutorials with only 1 or 2 other students
favourite part was definitely reductions, some of the tutorials presented insanely creative reductions that were fun to see

W26 with Brad Lushman

I took this course because I wanted to learn haskell. I did not expect to enjoy lambda calculus, type theory, and formal semantics as much as I did
the only course for which I actually read the course notes end to end

W26 with Samer Al-Kiswany

super useful for systems design interviews
at times some of the content was a bit dry, but since Samer is the GOAT it would still be engaging
Samer learned everyone's names (literally everyone's, even if you have never been to class) to "connect better with his colleagues", which is why hes the goat
- he also sat across from Leslie Lamport while interning at microsoft
the big project was to design and implement a distributed filesystem with caching, atomic transfers, and mutual exclusion on files
problems on the final were similar to system design, which was cool

W25 with David Toman

I'm sure the content was fine, but David Toman is genuinely an awful lecturer
why did we have to spend half the course on relational calculus and relational algebrea
I was looking forward to the SQL parts, which should tell you enough

W26 with Dan Holtby

I had this one bookmarked in first year and was looking forward to it since -- I even took CS348 solely to be able to take this. so my expectations were high, and I felt very disappointed
the course felt too implementation-heavy, and most of the interesting stuff was covered by CS454 anyway
the content has potential to be more interesting, could have been taught better