Background – School of Accounting and Finance and Our Strategic Plan:
Founded in 1957, the University of Waterloo has been unconventional from the start. That initial act of entrepreneurship, repeated many times on campus over the past six decades, led to the 1981 founding of Canada’s first School of Accountancy. With support from University leaders and various stakeholders, the School’s founders created and nurtured a new vision for the education of accounting professionals. We anticipated trends, addressed challenges, and emerged as the School of Accounting and Finance (SAF) – a community of accounting and finance academics and professionals, both on and off campus.
From these aspirational beginnings, the school has grown and evolved over the course of 35 years, creating numerous valuable and distinct assets. In early 2017, the SAF started implementation of an updated strategy that leverages three key strengths.
Outstanding Academic Programming: SAF has excelled at developing students with strong technical competencies. Our education gives students expertise in foundational knowledge areas such as financial reporting; strategy, governance, and risk management; capital markets; taxation; management accounting; managerial finance; business analytics; and assurance.
As a result, our undergraduate and graduate students have enjoyed tremendous success on professional exams, in case competitions, and in their chosen careers. Since 1981 more than 4,000 SAF students have become CPAs. 135 of these earned a place on the CFE honour roll. For five years in a row, SAF teams have represented Ontario Business Schools in the CFA Research Challenge. We have 1 global win in the competition and have been in the North American finals 10 times in its 12-year history.
Experiential learning: Waterloo’s founding innovation—a cooperative education program that is now the world’s largest—has always been central to SAF’s education. Co-operative education is mandatory for all our SAF students. This immersive, interactive learning ensures that our students enter the job market with an enriched capacity for problem-solving, an ability to thrive under pressure, and the confidence that only comes from real-world experience.
We’ve found new ways to integrate experiential learning into our education. The Student Investment Fund, launched in 2012, and the Student Venture Fund, launched in 2017, both give students the opportunity to manage investments in real time using real money. We are currently implementing Problem-Based Learning (PBL) into our curriculum as a logical extension of both SAF’s and the University’s educational philosophy.
World-class research and thought-leadership: Our research performance is among the best of all accounting and finance schools worldwide. The Brigham Young University (BYU) rankings of overall accounting research places us sixth in the world and second in Canada. We are leaders both nationally and globally in all research subject areas. In particular, we rank first in Canada in accounting information systems, assurance, managerial accounting, and tax, and second in Canada for financial reporting.
SAF views accounting and finance as fundamentally applied sciences. Thus, all our research aims to influence practice in one way or another. To this end, SAF has four Centers that focus explicitly on bridging the gap between research and practice. These include the Waterloo Center for Taxation in a Global Economy, the CPA Ontario Center for Performance Management Research & Education, the Center for Accounting Ethics, and the Center for Information Integrity and Information System Assurance.
The School’s strategy update identified the SAF’s brand image as a weakness. This project is an initial step to develop and implement improvements in brand, messaging, and communications with a range of audiences.
The budget for the three phases of the project is less than $90,000 CAD, before HST (ref. to Section 6.0) of the RFP document.
Questions regarding this Request for Proposal may be submitted (via email) to the RFP Contact Person as follows:
Christine Wagner, Senior Buyer - Procurement and Contract Services
University of Waterloo, East Campus
Waterloo ON N2L 5Z5
Email: cpwagner@uwaterloo.ca or, procure@uwaterloo.ca
