University of Ottawa Engineering Admission rates
Mr. Farhang Amini was an Undergraduate Representative on the 2019-2020 Council of the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Ottawa. During his time he advocated for current and future students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels with a focus on his department of Chemical and Biological Engineering.
On February 10, 2020, Dr. Michel Labrosse (the Vice-Dean of Undergraduate studies) provided a written report that focused on admission statistics. As there was no publicly available information available on the matter, Mr. Amini requested for permission to publish the report publicly.
The minutes of the meeting described the report as follows:
"There was a discussion of admission statistics, particularly about trends towards increased interest in high technology (CSI, SEG) and a decline in interest in traditional branches of engineering. However, it was also pointed out that in Africa there is great interest in Civil and Mechanical engineering as they have a large amount of infrastructure to create."
The report is presented as-is with two minor edits to preserve individual privacy. There may have been updates to the report and it should not be considered final. The admission rates for each program are have been calculated below:
Interim Faculty admission data
The acceptance rates for different programs across the faculty are comparable. With the highest rate being for Chemical Engineering (39%) and the lowest for Civil Engineering (28%). The overall acceptance rate of the faculty was 30%.
Interim admission count
Without a doubt, one can see that the Computer Science program is the most popular for undergraduate applicants. While the least popular program is Chemical Engineering.
Report from Vice-Dean Undergraduate Studies (Dr. Labrosse) to the Engineering Faculty Council
Items:
January registration period: did not go as smoothly as in September 2019. Five students were in such psychological distress that they needed to be escorted by Protection to Health Services. We were missing two staff members: [REDACTED-PRIVACY] (front line, operations) who moved to another Faculty (was just recently replaced), and [REDACTED-PRIVACY] (academic advisor) on medical leave. Because of the staff shortage, the Office reached capacity early in the day, and needed to be closed several afternoons. In turn, this caused students to send many emails, which also took manpower for processing. A compounding factor was those professors who were late submitting their grades. Not only did it force our staff to enter grades one by one, which is highly inefficient, but students also only learned whether or not they could register for upper courses when it was very late, which caused them to contact us in panic. A post-mortem of the period is underway with the USO staff.
Admission statistics: retrieved 31 Jan 2020
Visualization of admission data vs. targets until 31 Jan 2020, compared to year-ago (same time) YG1 data.
Admission rates to targets graph by program (Jan 24 and 31, 2020)
On voit que, comme l’année dernière, CVG, CEG, ELG et MCG sont en retard par rapport aux autres programmes quant aux cibles pour les demandes d’admission (App) et les offres (Adm), mais CEG et ELG sont bien moins en retard que l’année dernière, tandis que CVG et MCG sont un peu plus en retard que l’année dernière.
CSI et SEG vont très bien. CHG et MGB semblent bien aller.
Items in italics are direct quotations.
Cite as: Labrosse, M. (2020). Report from Vice-Dean Undergraduate. https://www.f-f-amini.ca/homepage/Engineering-Admission-Rates-at-uOttawa
Permission to publish
Mr. Amini emailed the Dean (Dr. Beauvais) and Vice-Dean Governance (Dr. Lethbridge) on May 17, 2019 asking to publish material presented to Undergraduate Representatives of Faculty Council publicly online to ease communication and to speed up the relaying of information to peers. In the conversations that followed the Vice-Dean Governance signaled his support for the initiative, and the Dean did not object.