ECE1B Review
A review of my ECE1B term at the University of Waterloo.
Posted: September 28, 2025 - Last Updated: September 28, 2025 - Tags: #university#ece
I survived!
This was probably the busiest time of my life, but here are my thoughts on the ~~the worst~~ best term of my life!
Courses and General Thoughts
Again, I was really swamped with work. If I were to rate my workload from 1-10, 1A would be an easy 7, with 1B being a 10. It's not so much that the content is much more difficult, but it's genuinely just so much to wrap your head around and practice.
Without further ado, here are my thoughts on the "fun" courses I took this term!
ECE 106 - Electromagnetism
The most infamous course of 1B, this course really worried me since many past students before me warned us about it, and failed the course. Coming from someone who didn't do amazingly well in ECE105, I really didn't want to fail this course.
Thankfully, they nerfed this course into the ground, I think. Or maybe I'm just a lot better at physics now?
In my opinion, the difficulty in this course comes from just the knowledge you need from both practicing the content, and reading the textbook. In the textbook's words, you can no longer imagine something happening in real life, since you literally have never seen it before. The most you can think of is maybe like magnets attracting and opposing each other. But if I were to ask you what happens to a magnetic field when you bring a current carrying wire close to it, you have to just know.
I had Dr. Fil Simovic, a new professor who was very nice and helpful. My one complaint would be that he did not go through any hard problems per say (questions that you would see on the midterm/final). But otherwise he was quite good at conceptually explaining the material and provided many fun demonstrations and examples.
Labs/Tutorials
Tutorials weren't great. Though the TA could solve the problems, they were not very great in explaining how they got to the answer other than just saying "this is the answer".
The labs were also not great, with the infamous David Lau as the lab instructor. It seemed that the general consensus was that he was not a good lab instructor. My complaints about these labs were unrelated to him specifically but more about the labs themselves.
You will be spending 3 hours trying your best to learn some obscure software that you will likely never use again while filling out answers which only give you a yes/no response. There is little to no feedback other than a short check in session (1 min) for each lab group. My only advice is have fun!
ECE 108 - Discrete Mathematics
This course was a lot of fun for me, we specifically focused on proofs and logic, and Matthew Harris had a lot of enthusiasm for the course. I would say that his course notes weren't as clear as MATH115 (Linear Algebra) but they were still quite good.
I don't really have much else to say about this course, just enjoy it! It wasn't bad at all!
Tutorials
The tutorials here were fine, I didn't find them particularly helpful but they were much better than the other courses.
ECE 124 - Digital Logic
This course taught the basics of digital logic and circuit composition in terms of logic gates. We luckily had Dr. William Bishop, the head of admissions, he was a great professor and explained the material exceptionally well. The one common complaint though that came up was his speaking speed was rather slow compared to other professors, but I think he was still great at explaining the material.
The course itself was also not bad, but it does get quite tedious at points and is a lot of procedure memorization above all.
Tutorials/Labs
I found the tutorials useless unless you were struggling with a specific concept, the labs were fun to practice VHDL, but ultimately also useless in my opinion (ECE150 covered the majority of programming related concepts).
ECE 140 - Linear Circuits
This course taught me that some problems were not meant to be solved. Just kidding, but in all seriousness, the majority of problems in the later parts of this course would take quite a while to completely solve, even with a calculator. The primary reason being you'll need to convert voltages between polar and rectangular forms.
In the end, it was still pretty fun, just a lot of work and making sure you did everything right. The marking scheme is in my opinion, odd. A correct final answer using the correct method is worth 100%. An correct final answer using the incorrect method is worth 0%. An incorrect final answer using the correct method is worth 60%. This means that if you forgot a decimal place, a negative sign, or any mistake at all you would get a 60%.
Dr. Mike Cooper-Stachowsky was a decent professor, he was able to teach the concepts somewhat well, I'll leave it at that.
Tutorials/Labs
This course had CDTs, or Computer Delivered Tutorials. Essentially, it was just an online quiz with infinite attempts. You can make of that what you will. The labs were also very plain, just measure or calculate a value and write it down hoping its correct. Both weren't very engaging although one could argue that the were helpful.
ECE 192 - Engineering Economics
This was my 1B equivalent of COMMST 192. It was a bit interesting to learn about some new concepts, but ultimatelY I felt it was again a waste of time. This was also a half credit course, and our prof, Dr. Ivan Calero, was engaging, but the course overall felt not related at all to ECE.
Tutorials
I'm just gonna be blunt and also say this was useless, it's genuinely like, you're given a b c, whats the final answer given these different functions that take these values.
MATH 119 - Calculus 2
This course was super super interesting. Taught by Dr. Nico Spronk, he was very engaged about his work, but unfortunately I think he had a hard time understanding the students. A lot of his lectures were had to understand, and a lot of his explanations would just be "it's trivial". I thought the final exam was a pretty bad representation of the course overall, but I'll leave it at that.
Co-op
This term was a bit hectic, lot's of work and many interviews to prep for.
I don't have the exact stats anymore but I did around 150~ applications over the 3 cycles, and got around 6 interviews. I ended up taking an offer to be a Software Engineering Intern from a company called GrandCharter in New York City.
Sorry this post was a bit short, but I hope it was still helpful!