Life at McGill

Blobof
Thu, 28 Jun 2007 14:39:50 +0000

OK, I can’t answer everything but:

1) It’s not hard to make friends, whether you live on campus or not (most students don’t live on campus, and most students coming from the Quebec education system start in U1 anyway). On the other hand, I don’t think there is a strong school spirit in the American sense. The Canadian university system is definitely different in that aspect.

2) Alcohol is not a forbidden fruit, so there is no pressure to drink. But attending Frosh (regular SSMU, and faculty ones, but not Radical Frosh) ain’t much fun if you don’t drink (because it’s mostly about drinking). Though in my personal opinion, Frosh is a waste of time and money (see point 1: making friends is easy, in fact, Frosh friendships may not last beyond Frosh). There are a few fraternities and sororities, but those are small and relatively obscure. So yes, McGill is more like Europe with respect to alcohol.

On the plus side, the official suppliers of SSMU are McAuslan and Boreale, local microbrews with great beers. Unfortunately this is underappreciated among undergrads, who tend to prefer quantity and lack of flavour over quality. McGill itself isn’t really a party school, but Montreal is definitely a party city (so one can have the best of both worlds).

3) Some AP’s taken may allow your son to skip some classes (this may require extra placement exams), in the sense, say, of taking calculus 3 instead of having to do cal 1 and 2 (this is just a toy example, I don’t know the actual details/requirements to get directly into higher level classes, your son will have to ask his advisor for that); though I don’t think they’ll transfer credits (meaning the total number of courses/credits required to complete his degree will not be reduced).