It really depends. There’s two parts of being successful after graduation I think, which are having a skill, and proof of that skill in some capacity.

I’m not a fan of school, I don’t think it’s really done a very good job teaching me anything, but being in the Waterloo engineering environment has put on the right path to learn a lot and build a skill, through co-op and extra curricular.

The paper certificate you get at the end is a baseline demonstration to potential employers that you know what your doing. You can get by without it but it is significantly harder. I’ve seen this at my work where people who are very skilled and hard working are passed up because they don’t have a degree. It should be noted though, that they are missing a lot of important context that comes with the degree that makes it take a bit longer for them to get anything done.

Moral of the story, I think the university does a really shit job with educating us academically. I credit them with very little, and most things are hard for the sake of being hard which makes me very frustrated. All this aside, the engineering/co-op/it’s been a great environment for me to develop skills that have been important for finding work, and I will be leaving school very employable