McGill, Concordia or Polytechnique?

PerpetualStudent
Sat, 10 Mar 2012 01:53:10 +0000

What kind of engineering?

Don’t be oversold on the co-op - what matters is that you get work experience. You can do the same thing at McGill with internships - they do have a (very good) engineering career center that will help you (MECC).

Polytechnique has an excellent reputation academically and now requires at least 1 co-op term (stage) before you can graduate with your B.Eng.

I work in a pretty large Quebec-based engineering firm (though I have a B.Sc. not a B.Eng) and most of my engineer coworkers are (more or less in order) from ETS, Sherbrooke, Polytechnique, Laval, Concordia and a few from McGill.

$50-60k is the normal starting salary for an engineering graduate here. It picks up fairly fast in the first few years.

My personal experience with Concordia vs. McGill is that Concordia’s classes are overall easier, much larger, and the students (on average) are weaker. No breath taking news there, and there are exceptions - this is just the overall trend I noticed.

I’d recommend Poly or McGill but make sure you are busy every summer. Either work in industry (best option) or do research internships with your profs (also useful for grad school, not as much for industry employment).