Pros/cons? (Argue all you want)

drmambo
Wed, 12 Dec 2007 13:33:21 +0000

I can’t speak about the funding, because I don’t know what to look for when it comes to how well funded a school is. I can say this, there are definitely other schools that throw around more money than McGill (i.e. U of Toronto, and their debating union Harthouse; Harthouse members don’t have to pay any fees to travel around for debating tournaments, U of T covers them).

As for respect back home: McGill (to people in the Midwest, who are in “the know”) still holds the, wildly inaccurate, reputation of being Canada’s best, and an “undercover” ivy-league caliber school. My dad doesn’t even believe me when I explain that McGill being the harvard of canada isn’t that accurate.

I’m in engineering, so all my classes are math and science related. That being said, I’ve watched a decent amount of MIT lectures to supplement my own, and the difference in quality between my profs and the MIT’s isn’t proportional to the difference in price. While at times the MIT prof’s touch on ambiguous points my own profs didn’t, it’s not like professors here don’t hold office hours that they wouldn’t love for you to attend. From my experience, the professors here want you to do well, and they want you to seek them out if you don’t understand something.

Class size here is very program dependent. For art’s kids, there are a decent mix of big classes and small classes. I have a couple friends in a “literature and democracy” class that’s capped off at around 30 or so. My physics section was capped at 80, but had no more than 35 people in it at any given time. Hell that class was so small my professor actually knew who I was/asked me about my twin when he dropped the course. He also knew me as the kid who told him to “pound it” every time he answered a question for me after class.

There’s attention here if you look for it, but if you’re not willing to go out of your way, you’ll be just another body in a 300 person lecture hall.

If you live in Rez your first year you won’t see or deal with the “commuters or Quebecois” so making friends won’t be a problem.