Being a UW student can be really rewarding with all the opportunities and services that our campus has to offer. However, any UW student knows that given the size of the campus and the UW population it can also be overwhelming AF.
With everything that goes on within the University, keeping up with relevant updates – academic and social – can be a difficult task. As a result, The Student Success Office (SSO) proposed and led the creation of a very practical communication tool, known as UW Portal. They worked in collaboration with Information and Systems Technology (IST) and various Campus Partners to collects any relevant information UW students would need on a day to day basis and ultimately display them through one central gateway.
This sounds amazing! Tell me more!
Think of UW portal as a “one stop shop” for anything Waterloo-related. Your class just ended and you want to grab a bite to eat? Just use Portal to check out all the different food services on campus, along with their hours of operation and their menus.
Um yeah that’s cool but I have back-to-back classes and only have ten minutes to buy something.
No problem. Portal also has a fancy crowd reporter, which lets you know how busy any place on campus is (including libraries) to help you save time.
When you log onto the website: https://uwportal.uwaterloo.ca using your Quest ID and password, you will be directed to your personal homepage. The standard features on every homepage are: 1. The weather 2. Your class schedule for the day and 3. Any reminders about important academic dates or notifications (i.e. when tuition fees are due, when the final exam schedule is released, when drop/add periods end…etc). With that, you will also have certain “widgets” that you can use to personalize your homepage even more based on information that means the most to you. For myself, I like to use the widgets about Food (so I know which places on campus are still open), Employer Information Sessions, WatCard (so I can stay up to date on my balance), GRT (to get real time bus schedules for any bus from the KWC area), Crowd Reporter (which helps me save some time by telling me how busy DC is) and lastly, Open Classrooms (which actually gives a full list of any available classroom, if I’m looking for a space to hold group meetings or to study in).
You can also check out information about athletics (i.e. shoe tag class schedules, information about intramural games, as well as any information about varsity games), academic resources (i.e. academic advisors, tutors, and other available services on campus). For a full list of all the available widgets check out the information the SSO has about them here: https://uwaterloo.ca/student-portal/widgets.
Wow. I am amazed.
I know, it’s pretty cool. If you’re a Waterloo student (or even a faculty member), you should definitely give it a shot; it will make your life at Waterloo a lot easier.
Y’all can thank me later.