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About Recreation and Leisure Studies

Our Programs

The Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies offers Honours Bachelor of Arts programs which combine a knowledge of people, environments and management into an academic package that prepares graduates for careers in a variety of public and private agencies. In addition, the program provides a good foundation for future graduate studies.

Undergraduate programs are offered on co-operative (work-study) and regular bases. Students graduate with an Honours Bachelor of Arts in Recreation and Leisure Studies, Recreation and Business, or Therapeutic Recreation. A "Double Degree in Recreation and Business and Therapeutic Recreation" is also available. A new degree in Tourism and Parks Management is proposed to begin in September 2011, combining the requirements of the Tourism Option and Parks Option into a major degree. Students may also complete the Parks Option or Tourism Option within the department, or an interdisciplinary option, minor or joint honours degree from numerous departments across campus to further tailor their degree for their future career path.

Graduate programs are available at both the Masters and Ph.D. levels. Students may complete a Master of Arts in Recreation and Leisure Studies or in Tourism Policy and Planning. In addition to the Ph.D. in Recreation and Leisure Studies, two new collaborative Ph.D. programs are available within the Faculty of Applied Health Sciences: Aging, Health and Well-being; and Work and Health. Recognizing the interdisciplinary nature of the field, graduate students are encouraged to focus their studies on the interrelationship between recreation/leisure and one or more of the following theme areas:

Our Reputation

The University of Waterloo continues to rank "most innovative, best overall, and most likely to produce the leaders of tomorrow" in the Maclean's reputational survey for comprehensive universities in Canada, a position held for most of the past 19 years. Maclean's measures the reputation of Canadian universities by soliciting the opinions of high-school guidance counsellors, university officials, heads of a wide variety of national and regional organizations, and CEOs and recruiters at large and small corporations. Waterloo leads comprehensive universities - those with significant research and graduate programs as well as undergraduate programs, but without medical schools - in the categories of student retention, percentage of students who win national academic awards, classes taught by tenured faculty, awards per full-time faculty, and alumni support.

The internationally renowned Department of Recreation and Leisure Studies is the highest ranking leisure studies department amongst the top 41 of 213 North American institutions in terms of research publications in five major North American peer-reviewed scholarly leisure journals statistically analyzed by University of Alberta scholar, Ed Jackson, and published in Leisure Sciences (2004, Vol 26). He writes, “Little needs to be said by way of commentary on the data, except to note that the University of Waterloo is the top ranking department of leisure studies in North America. This finding was only partly accounted for by a large number of authors (56, tied with Texas A&M University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). The unusually high level of per capita productivity at Waterloo (mean number of authorships per person = 5.68) produced a total number of authorships of 318, which was 57% more than Texas A&M and 67% more than UIUC."

The University of Waterloo has also been ranked in the top 10 of the world's tourism researchers. A recent ranking of academic performance among tourism researchers placed the University of Waterloo eighth in the world over the past five years from over 200 institutions based on publishing more than one paper in selected academic outlets. Although the analysis is subject to several limitations, most notably only three major journals were included in the study (Annals of Tourism Research, Journal of Travel Research and Tourism Management) with obvious major omissions such as Tourism Analysis and no conference proceedings from dozens of possible options, and the report measures quantity as opposed to other substantive measures such as quality and impact, nevertheless, our lofty position is a credit to the rather small number of tourism researchers concentrated in RLS and the Faculty of Environment here at UW. Kudos to all involved!

Faculty members in the department are active scholars in terms of the high quality and quantity of their published work, success at obtaining research funding, involvement in leadership roles in professional organizations, and review board activities for the major journals in the field and for granting agencies. This unusually high level of quality research productivity means that students benefit from the latest research in their courses and independent research supervision.

The University of Waterloo offered one of the first undergraduate degree programs in recreation and leisure studies including the first co-operative education program, as well as the first MA and PhD programs in recreation and leisure studies in Canada. Our program remains one of the largest leisure programs in Canada.

The department celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2008-2009 and has over 3000 graduates, including 28 PhD graduates all employed in teaching and research positions at universities around the world.