UW engineering students pull school bus across Waterloo for children’s charities

Engineering students at the University of Waterloo (UW) came together to pull a school bus across the city to raise money for charity Sunday morning.

Engineering students at the University of Waterloo (UW) came together Sunday morning and pulled a school bus across the city to raise money for charity.

It’s an annual accomplishment for students in the faculty who choose to sign up and get involved.

“It’s a big part about finding people who just want to have fun and want to do something silly like this,” said management engineering student, Ana Hogiu. “This is something sort of out of the ordinary and something that you can only do once or a few times in your lifetime. [It’s] a lot about community and lots of fun.”

More than 20 students lined up in front of the school bus to pull it 6.4 kilometres from the Carl A. Pollock Hall building on campus to downtown Kitchener.

The event raised money both before and during the event to go toward Canada’s Children’s Hospital Foundations, a non-profit that raises funds for 13 of Canada’s children’s hospitals.

“We’ve been working with them to see where they would want all this money to go,” said Hogiu. “Once we have all of our donations, then we’re going to spread that evenly wherever they see fits best. So, it’s really rewarding work.”

Donations were collected through fees to join ‘Bus Push 2025,’ as well as through fundraising by the students and their classes.

Onlookers were also able to donate as the bus was pulled past them through a QR code on the side of the bus.

The event comes as National Engineering Month wraps up, which happens every March in celebration of the hard work of engineers.

On Sunday, the students worked through a campus power outage and freezing rain to make the event a success.

Mary Wells, the dean for the UW Faculty of Engineering, said she knows how big of a feat this is, especially when they originally expected closer to 50 students.

“Because the weather is not as good, there’s not as many of them. So, it’ll be an even bigger load on each of them,” said Wells. “But they’re so committed to our community… I’m so proud of them for doing this early on a Sunday morning when it’s wet and a little cold out there, they’re still up here, very enthusiastic to help out in our community.”

The students aim to raise $10,000 for the non-profit.

“To see the care and camaraderie they have with each other and their commitment to doing something bigger than themselves for a larger community, it’s so wonderful,” said Wells.