<p>^ The title explains it all. Also, what about unweighted GPA. I’ve learned that Canada basically accepts students by looking at their transcript. </p>
<p>Also… how is Mcgill different from top unis in U.S.? I want to attend, but I feel as if the change might be a lot. So could any U.S. mcgill person input their experience on any of the listings below? Thanks!
- weather (I live southern U.S.)
- campus life, language? french o/ english more,
- surrounding food shops/restaurants, including student life during weekends
- Teachers (informacion important). How do they teach? Clearly?</p>
<p>TY in advance :)</p>
<p>From the McGill website, the median SAT score for enroled students is 2060, the median GPA is 3.8/4.0 UW. For Americans, the SAT/ACT is required and used. McGill’s published minima for test scores are minimum cutoffs below which you should not apply. Having the minimum in no way implies acceptance. </p>
<p>If I were to estimate where McGill would fall in the USNews rankings, I would put it in the 20 to 25 range. </p>
<p>For some detailed answers, take a look at a thread I started last year, especially the first 2 or 3 pages of posts:
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/mcgill-university/844836-ask-mcgill-alumnus.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/mcgill-university/844836-ask-mcgill-alumnus.html</a></p>
<p>Quick answers;
1-Long, cold snowy winters. It’s Montreal! The city is geared for it and it is (usually) enjoyable. I’d prefer January in Montreal to August in New Orleans.
2-A knowledge of French is not required at McGill except in the Faculty of Law, which is bilingual. The Montreal metro area is home to about 600,000 anglophones (English mother tongue residents). A lack of French will not prevent you from having a normal life even when you move off campus although off-campus work without French would be difficult. Francophones comprise a significant 17% minority of McGill’s enrolment.<br>
3-See linked thread
4-Teaching is about the same as at US universities. There are foreign faculty who speak near perfect English like at most schools. Some foreign TA’s, who handle discussion sections, are not that fluent in spoken English but this too is common at most schools.</p>
<p>will an UW gpa of 3.5-3.6 prevent me from being accepted? I know that top canadian unis focus a lot in transcript…but my w gpa is 4.6 ?:-</p>
<p>Would not prevent acceptance, it just makes the probabilty of scceptance less than if you had say a 3.8 UW.</p>
<p>polar bear, that gpa is good enough for mcgill!</p>
<p>mcgill is comparable to a good state school from the US, not berkeley or michigan though.</p>
<ol>
<li>It is cold and the snow stays on the ground. But bring a good jacket and it is definitely doable.</li>
<li>English, although I agree with French you can get outside the bubble more. </li>
<li>there is lots of partying and clubbing on weekends, actually it starts on thursday. </li>
<li>teachers teach in huge lecture halls like leacock 132 with 600+ students. They basically don’t know you exist unless you approach them. you get good teachers and bad teachers.</li>
</ol>
<p>econgrad: Most international rankings of universities place McGill far far ahead of most of the best state schools and somewhat ahead of Berkeley and U Mich. For example, the Times Higher Education ranks McGill at 18th in the world, U of Mich at 19th, and Berkeley at 39th. </p>
<p>Certainly, there are different ways to rank universities and everyone’s experiences are different, but McGill is generally considered a world-class university and almost no state schools can even make it into the top 100 in the world.</p>
<p>Re: OP’s question on how McGill is different from the top unis in the US:
- McGill has a much more diverse, cosmopolitan, international feel to it. It has twice as large a proportion of international students as Yale, Harvard, and Princeton do. It has several times as many students for whom English is not the first language compared to those schools. The Ivies work very hard at trying to ensure diversity in their student bodies; at McGill, diversity just happens.<br>
- McGill is much much larger (in terms of undergraduates) than the Ivies are and is also considerably less selective than they are given how large the entering classes are at McGill(hence there is greater diversity of past student achievement).<br>
- McGill, as a whole, will probably feel somewhat more leftist politically compared to the top US schools. Canada as a country is quite a ways to the left of the US (we’ve had universal health care for decades and can’t imagine a civilized humane state not wanting it; note: this is perhaps more a reflection on our lack of imagination than anything else!).<br>
- Classes will tend to be larger at McGill than at the Ivies, particularly in first year, as econgrad mentions. That is part of the reason that most McGill students will be paying just under US$2,000 for tution this year for the whole academic year (and Ivy students over $40,000). Econgrad does exaggerate the size of the classes. My son is in first year (where classes are largest) and he does not have any classes with more than 100 students. Overall, though, econgrad is correct in his implication that you are less likely to have a lot of personal interaction with your professors at McGill compared to the $40,000+ schools.</p>
<p>Re: “surrounding food shops/restaurants”: McGill is on the edge of downtown Montreal and a couple of short blocks from St. Catherine Street (which is a major shopping street) and from several underground interconnected malls (helps during the cold season). There are countless restaurants and bars within walking distance. Very few (if any) of the best US universities would have this proximity to this array of options.</p>
<p>Violindad: Thank you! Re: class size. Even at large $$$ private universities in the US, freshman class size can be very large. This includes Harvard. Some freshman lectures there have 200 to 500 hundred students, with the larger class sizes in the sciences. No one at Harvard complains about class size because…well, it’s Harvard.</p>