Founded as a Baptist college and a christian school of learning by Canadian Senator William McMaster in 1887. Originally located in Toronto at McMaster Hall on Bloor Street near Bloor & Church street, it moved to Hamilton Ontario in 1930.
It dropped its Baptist affiliation in 1957 and became a full fledged public university at that time.
McMaster is known as "MAC" by those that go there. It is also known as SweatsU for all the frumpy looking students it has by the snobby students at U of T.
McMaster has about 15,000 students, about 10,000 undergraduate and 5,000 graduate. Strong schools in Engineering, Physcial and Natural Sciences, Medicine, Humanities and Social Sciences.
The McMaster Medical School pioneered an MD program where student doctors would start seeing patients from day 1 and be involved in clinical care immediately. It adopted a problem / case based approach to medical learning instead of the usual rote and memoriazation process.
It was so successfull that even the good folks at Harvard Medical School adopted it as their "pathways" program.
McMaster Engineering has the tradtional set of four year engineering degrees but also some innovative five year programs like Engineering and Management and Engineering and Society.
Engineering students at McMaster, like most engineering students in Canada are a rowdy bunch. The social scence for most engineers at MAC is the engineering society, which acts like a psudeo fraternity, with secret rituals and handshakes etc. The ultimate secret ritual is of course the iron ring ceremony which most canadian engineering students have as their ultimate goal.