<p>I have been reading this forum for several months and my question is why choose McGill. I have read more negatives on this forum than on any of the other forums of the schools that my son has applied to. I would like this to be a positive thread to see why my son should choose McGill over schools like Northwestern, UVA, Emory etc. So far he has been admitted to Fac of Science and we are waiting to hear about A&S. Besides the location, what makes McGill so great!!! Also, specifically for McGillDad - is there anything special about the A&S faculty besides being able to take both arts and sciences. Are there any other perks to being in the A&S program.</p>
<p>Why should your son choose McGill over Northwestern, UVA, Emory, etc? Well the common thread between all those schools would be a) american students, and b)social attitude. </p>
<p>After spending my school year up here, I actually feel a cultural difference going back home (I just spent my reading week visiting my friend at Harvard, and I felt the difference there...to say the least). Living near Northwestern, and coming from a high school that had like 14 NU admits, I would say NU's least attractive quality are it's students. I don't know the college much, but evanston isn't where I'd want to be for 4 years, not to mention I don't really know how "bangin" the campus life is there (i.e. what there's to do on weekdays/weekends, if Frats are the only sources of parties...).</p>
<p>Emory's in the South, and that should say enough. If you want good weather, good ol' fashion southern hospitality, and subtle to overt racism (depending on the person) Atlanta is more than the place for you. </p>
<p>UVA - it's a state school that likes to believe it isn't (think U Michigan). I believe Frats are a big source of campus entertainment (partially because I equate UVA, to UIUC except w/o the cornfields; there can't be much happening around UVA). </p>
<p>If your kid's having doubts coming here, don't let him come. The beautiful thing about places like Emory and NU, is that they'll hold your hand or do something partially resembling of such for your entire stay there. McGill will not. So if your kid isn't at the maturity point yet, where he thinks hes capable of basically handling his entire education, and after a year, living situation as well (not to mention whether he can handle a lowered drinking age), McGill probably isn't for him. </p>
<p>Ultimately, I'm a bit puzzled at your question, though, because I feel like it's highly misguided. 1) this is the only forum that's cool enough with itself to expose the flaws of its school; ipso facto, we're the most negative forum (because not every school is perfect, so why should we pretend).
2) shouldn't be calling McGill, and letting it sell itself to you? You're ultimately asking people who don't really give two *****s whether your son comes here or not to sell the school to you (in my opinion, a bad call). In that respect, I'm not even really sure why I'm responding to this at all...</p>
<p>Bottom of the line, McGill pros: more canadians than any american university, and subsequently, most unique college experience (how many bros can your son stare at, at the NU, Emory, UVA, etc. frat parties before he realized that academically he's probably in the right area, but socially...). Education is as good here as it gets anywhere in north america (I honestly believe that, however I'm only talking about sciences). Location: its in downtown Montreal (a city I appreciate more and more every time I visit my friends in other cities back in the US). You can get anything you want here, you just need to look/work for it (i.e. on campus employment (research, library jobs, etc.), club funding, etc.)
Cons: transparent administration (which is technically a pro, I think). Larger lectures (not really a con for me, but for others), high final weights (but that's something you can turn into a benefit).</p>
<p>dr - I appreciate that you took the time to reply. If you are addicted to cc like I am, not my son who never comes on here, you start to let the posts get to your head. You are right in that this forum has more discussion "exposing the flaws" than any other forums that I have gone on and I have started letting it affect my attitude about McGill. My son on the other hand is all about McGill - and in the end, given financial considerations, he will have the final decision.</p>
<p>The main concern regarding McGill University in Montreal is the size of the undergraduate lecture classes which, according to one major publication, average over 550 students per class. Several current McGill students have posted on this forum noting that McGill is famous for its graduate programs. Many Americans select McGill for its low cost & beautiful location. The three other universities listed in your initial post on this thread also all offer magnificant locations & much better undergraduate programs. Evanston/Chicago, Atlanta & Charlottesville are three of the best college locations in the country--and I am well acquainted with all three. Regarding quality of undergraduate education, the behemoth classes & lack of funding at McGill Univ. places it a very distant fourth among the four in my opinion.</p>
<p>Don't believe everything you hear about "large" classes (over 550 on average? give me a break, the only room big enough to accommodate that many people is Leacock 132, and classes that large are split into seperate sections in most if not all cases) . Though it depends on the program, most classes are not huge (though "huge" is relative) and the average class size drops quite dramatically after the first year (or the first midterm in each class...).</p>
<p>And much better undergrad programs elsewhere? From a Canadian perspective, the material taught anywhere is pretty much the same. Though the approach to some subjects and/or availability of certain classes may make some difference (e.g. places with coop programs, for those interested in that sort of thing), it's hard to see how to objectively define "much better".</p>
<p>OK, for good things about McGill: despite icy9ff8's claims that there are "much better" undergrad programs out there, the education you'll get at McGill is top notch and, provided the student does his/her part in the learning process, can lead to any grad school (I'll spare you the list of where some of my classmates went, because it's long). It's hard to beat the amount of diversity and interaction between people with different cultural backgrounds there is. The city has lots to offer (nightlife, food, culture, arts, sports), and all that in a small and accessible geographic area; but for the love of God, get out of the McGill ghetto.</p>
<p>The one (big for certain) caveat: McGill expects a lot of independence from its students. Nothing is given to you on a silver platter, and you have to seek attention and help if you want/need them.</p>
<p>collegeobsessed: The college experience varies so greatly and what a student is looking for, or needs also varies so much it is impossible for strangers to generalize about which school is best for any individual. I have two daughters: both very bright and committed. One needed hand-holding and wanted a "community of similar people"- she went to a very top LAC and loved it. My youngest wanted a cultural experience, big city-life and independence- she loves McGill. She lives in an apartment with Quebecoise friends, travels all over the City and partakes in all Montreal has to offer.</p>
<p>I will say unequivocally that McGill gives a much broader, and more challenging education experience than the LAC. Lectures are large, but her learning is cutting-edge. Good grades are much harder to come by than the LAC where "all the students are above average." My McGill student will graduate prepared much better for grad school and with McGill's reputation she will have no trouble getting accepted to a fine program. She does work very hard, much more than I ever did.</p>
<p>Except for two required courses for A&S I do not know of any other perks. They do have their own orientation and partial frosh events. But, most classes are in regular faculties. If there are more benefits, my daughter doesnt participate, or I am not aware of them. She does have an A&S adviser who is more available than the normal adviser.</p>
<p>Your son has great choices, and cant lose. Feel free to PM me with other questions.</p>
<p>I guess you could really skew this conversation any way you want to. On one hand, it can be good that McGill has this sense of independence, but on the other hand I have a deeper feeling that even though a kid may appear to need independence, at heart, all high school kids need some sense of guidance when they enter this whole new world. I.E.- I felt a much warmer feeling at Queen's than I did at McGill, mostly because Queen's seems to help its students out when they first come there and actually gives a crap about their college experiences. (I think this is a very valid point because I am also considering other schools like Emory)</p>
<p>Question: Do most students at McGill find their comfort zone after the first few months or do most kids struggle with grades the whole time?</p>
<p>P.S.- drmambo: I think your views on Emory are skewed. From what I have seen of Atlanta, it is certainly not some southern plantation town and is just as metropolitan and chic as Montreal. (In fact, Emory has one of the top percentages of Jewish students of any school in America) Please don't give people bad images of Emory and Atlanta.</p>
<p>Adam: Nothing wrong with Emory and Atlanta. But when you say Atlanta is "just as metropolitan and chic as Montreal" you are losing some credibility. I know Atlanta and Montreal well and there is no comparison.</p>
<p>Emory is an excellent, though somewhat conservative, school.</p>
<p>I know that McGill is an excellent school that I would put on par with the Northwesterns, UVAs and Emorys of the world. I think it comes down to what type of experience your son wants. Obviously, you have the Gallic flavor of being in Montreal and studying in Canada, which personally I think is a plus. Has your son visited all the schools he's applying or has applied to?</p>
<p>Also, in defense of UVA, Virginia is not all about fraternities. Sure 30% of the student body is Greek, but I was part of the 70% that wasn't and had a blast. Plus, UVA is definitely not like Michigan. Yes, academically we're pretty on par, but socially, the collegiate experience at UVA is very different from other public schools. It's hard to get a sense of that unless you visit the Grounds (we don't say "campus") which is a UNESCO site, and see where Presidents Jefferson, Madison and Monroe literally laid the cornerstone of the University, view the ubiquitous graffiti left by UVA's various secret societies, check out Woodrow Wilson's and Edgar Allan Poe's old dorm rooms on the Range, go to thrilling football, basketball, soccer and lacrosse games, or dress up and party at the biannual Foxfield Horse Races. Attending UVA - a public school with a private school atmosphere - is a very unique experience.</p>
<p>Plus, UVA and McGill are sister schools as members of Universitas</a> 21.</p>
<p>In respect to the Globalist, I'm retracting my statements about UVA. </p>
<p>In response to Adam Kalle: As a member of the tribe, I fail to see the correlation between a city's chicness, metropolitan-ness, and it's jewish community. Plenty of un-chic places have jews (think Albany, NY)... To the real issue though:
I don't think your generalization of "every high school student" is fair. I wouldn't have minded hand-holding, but I believed I was more than ready to leave the security nets of high school (and that, to me, meant going to a place that was a "security-net-free" as possible). </p>
<p>Queen's is a spectacular school, with, I've been told (but have never visited), spectacular facilities (at least for the engineers). Of course they're going to "give a crap about college experiences" they're mission statement makes undergraduate experience a priority. </p>
<p>Where is such an expression in McGill's mission statement? 1) I don't know McGill's statement off the top of my head, and 2) if I were to write the statement it'd read something like this: McGill is dedicated to providing it's students with the opportunity to receive an education who's breadth is as equally wide as the curriculum is challenging. </p>
<p>To echo Blobof @ Icy: 550+ average students/lecture? You've got to be *****ting me. It's like you people want to believe everything negative you hear. I don't even think UIUC (my state school back home) has average lecture sizes that big, and it's got, total, 8k more students that McGill. </p>
<p>Also, how familiar are you with Evanston? Growing up 15 minutes from it, I don't really think it's all that, or even close enough to chicago to couple the two together. Should NU students want to get downtown they have to take the purple line (am I making that up...?), and if I've learned anything from a brief stay at Harvard (where Cambridge is near analogous to Evanston, with the red-line t-stop, and everything), it's that you get lazy having a mini-city in your backyard. So much so, that you never really get around to exploring the proper city near you. </p>
<p>Using the brief assumption that you spend the majority of your time, as an NU student, in Evanston and NOT Chicago, I'd say it's giving NU a little too much credit to their proximity to Chicago. Chicago should not be the deciding factor on one's acceptance of NU's offer. </p>
<p>Also, I'm sorry you suffer from the common mindset that endowment yields better undergraduate experience...I'm sure the Ivies laugh all the way to the bank with their students tuition checks after hearing that crock... Fun fact, even through our "lack of funding" we still have comparable facilities to everyone's favorite school in Cambridge (that meaning, we have just as many libraries on our main campus as they do. If anything, more science laboratories, you get the idea). </p>
<p>I had more to say, but I forget/don't care THAT much...</p>
<p>haha, i laughed when i read about jews!
I don't get why that was mentioned. It doesnt prove any chic factor or anything.</p>
<p>I appreciate all the responses on this thread. Son now got into the A&S program at McGill in addition to science. We won't find out about the rest of the schools until 4/1 and we have not yet visited every school on his list. Hoping we can get back up to mcGill soon.</p>
<p>I also found one publication's estimate of introductory course large lectures to be in the 550+ category hard to accept. Another publication also notes, as a negative, the large lecture class sizes at McGill. This was discussed and confirmed--without specific class sizes--on CC several weeks ago. I just called McGill admissions and they said that the 550 number was too large as only the concert halls seat that many. McGill admissions stated that lectures average about 200, up to 300, students. Recently I communicated with a current McGill freshman who confirmed that all of his lecture classes were very large. Endowment is a very important factor regarding the quality of undergraduate education as a healthy endowment used wisely affects class size, student-teacher ratio & facilities as well as opportunities for undergraduates. The two publications to which I referred are CP's The Big Book of Colleges '08 & PR's Best 361 Colleges (first paragraph under "academics" quotes "All of my classesfirst year are prerequisites, and the class size is almost 600 in all my lectures" but " once you get to upper level classes..." classes are much smaller). Also many of the larger science lectures are available online. Again, I recently confirmed with a current freshman that intro classes class size is in the hundreds--at least all of his classes are. Student quality at McGill is also written as being very mixed . I love Montreal, but the undergraduate experience is quite different than that at Emory & Northwestern both of which have large endowments and low student-teacher ratios.</p>
<p>Student quality's a problem, eh? You should be happy to know then that since athletics aren't really a big deal here, recruitment isn't that heavy (aka, we don't have athletes bringing down the average entering GPA, like some other schools <em>cough</em> all of the ivy leagues <em>cough</em><em>cough</em><em>shudder</em><em>pass out</em>).</p>
<p>You know the beautiful part about being a self-motivated and independent student? You're not that bogged down by large class sizes. About class sizes, though: as an engineering student, all of my important pre-reqs are large lectures (calculus being 120+ students, physics being 200+, and chem being 400+), I do have small classes, however. My ethics and practice class (EDER 494, so if you couldn't tell, it's an upper level class) only has about 30 people in it. My management core class (MGCR 352) has 60 kids in it, and that's a second year required course (meaning that the class sizes only get smaller from there). Those, ironically, are the classes I like least, and that's partially because of the small teacher to student ratio. It's nice to be anonymous, at times. </p>
<p>As a public university, the student quality, of course is going to be mixed, but I can safely say you'll find the same kind of intellectual diversity at universities like NU and emory (hell I know a kid who cheated his way through high school, and ended up at NU...we'll see how that works out for him, and NU). There are kids at McGill that got accepted to way more prestigious universities, but decided fiscally, this was the best option (a friend of mine had his choice of all the top engineering schools in the world, but didn't want to force his family to shell out the $45+k a year). </p>
<p>I think your main problem is a) your trusting what some idiots wrote in a college book, and b) your trusting a book about American universities to tell you about a Canadian university. Those college books are as skewed as the USNWR rankings, and the kids they interview aren't necessarily typical students at the school. </p>
<p>I'm glad you "confirmed" things with other freshmen, but what you confirmed was a fact of life at major public universities. Who ever b!tches about class sizes once they're attending McGill must not have known what they were getting into, and doesn't have my sympathy. </p>
<p>I still think theres a major oversight in your post: you (though inadvertently) correlate student-teacher ratio with quality. Plenty of my friends goto schools with low student-teacher ratios, but the education they're getting, in my opinion, is infinitely crappier than McGill's. They might have to wait another year and a half before they end the "high school 2.0" phase of their college experiences. There's also the obvious refutation that if your stupid, it doesn't matter how much personal time you get with the teacher, but I'm not gonna make that. </p>
<p>A smaller class size, for my science classes, would benefit few due to the amount of material that needs to be covered. It's not the size that hurts people, it's the pace, and be real: no professor (in a low s-t situation) is going to divert an entire lecture to make sure one student understands something. So logically, a low s-t ratio looks good on paper, but for the purposes of an engineering of science education, that's all it is. As long as your professor holds officer hours, what's the problem? Officer hours are clearly the more appropriate time to seek one on one guidance, not during the lecture.</p>
<p>I am sorry that I offended you; that was not my intent. From now on we should all agree that McGill University is exempt from any critical comments, analysis or observations whatsoever. I'll notify the authorities. I think that your last post has given us all a very vivid impression of the "Harvard of the North". All Americans, McGill students, publishers & editors now stand corrected. How dare we comment on your sanctuary of heavenly bliss & educational perfection. Again I am certain that all things American--especially our institutions of higher education--will immediately correct our deficiencies to comply with your commands, O Great One. P.S. As per your advice, I will stop doing research that involves reading books & personal interviews of first hand experience. And I will learn to use foul language when responding to others, O Great One from the frozen Harvard of the North.</p>
<p>hahahahahaha. You don't sound very sorry... If anything I'm sorry. Perhaps I came off as crass, or rude, if that's the case, again I'm sorry. </p>
<p>I'm glad you know how to twist words, though. I said nothing to the effect that you shouldn't read books, I merely pointed out that you should try finding competent, and authoritative sources. American universities (at least the small ones), are not the same as Canadian universities, and thus I would never assume an american style of university critique will be completely applicable. </p>
<p>I didn't say stop interviewing either, I just said that you confirmed something that's a well known fact: intro classes are big at public universities. Next time ask someone something unique, like how attentive are professors to your needs when you see them at their office hours? Do they brush you off? Do they check and respond to email often?</p>
<p>I feel like in the end, it was you that was offended, not me. And if that's the case, you're lucky your still in America. Whenever you get out to see someone about how a college student on a college forum hurt your feelings, you won't have to wait in line for 13 hours, or make an appointment 4 weeks prior to do so.</p>
<p>On a more serious note in response to the original post, McGill 's location is outstanding and, from a male perspective, the male to female ratio is wonderful. In my opinion, McGill is on par with the University of Wisconsin and the Univ of California at San Diego. McGill's undergraduate education is not at the level of the other schools, Emory, Northwestern or Virginia, mentioned in the original post, in my opinion. Of the six students that I know from the U.S. who are currently attending McGill, their primary consideration was cost, then location & reputation.(At least one has dual U.S./Canadian citizenship and may be enjoying even lower tuition than is available to other U.S. students.) An interesting note, also noted in this thread's original post, is that the harshest criticisms of, and most negative comments about, McGill come from McGill undergraduate students. The compliments regarding McGill can be found in the U.S. college guidebooks such as PR, CP & Fiske. I recognize that it takes a very mature and determined student to navigate the first year or two of any large university and I am envious of anyone attending McGill Univ. due to the location, culture and sense of adventure of living & learning in a foreign culture. P.S. Both Wisconsin & UCSD are very highly regarded universities,as you probably know.The student to teacher ratio is 7 to 1 at Northwestern and at Emory, while Virginia, McGill , Wisconsin & UCSD range from 13 to 1, to 19 to 1.</p>
<p>I am also interested in any first hand comparisons between McGill University & Cornell University as I suspect that they may share a number of similarities with respect to class size & academics.</p>
<p>The chic thing had nothing to do with Jewish people. I was simply explaining that Atlanta was far from the place that drmambo mentioned and that fact many Jewish people go to Emory shows that its not some WASP school. It is a diverse school and not like it was back in like 1846. Don't come in here with your **** about how you think Atlanta is some racist plantation, you obviously haven't been there and you sound like an idiot spewing generalized statements like that.
Also, maybe you should think about getting a life guys. Are you into college yet? YOU DON'T NEED THIS SITE ANYMORE! 2,020 posts is a little bit too much, BIGTWIX. Maybe you should actually be enjoying life rather than making over 2,000 posts on college discussion. I come here to ask questions that people might know the answers to that will help me in the process of deciding which school I will go to. You shouldn't use this as a chat room where you just spew your ********. (and I'm not talking about the people who provide helpful answers).</p>
<p>above poster, but what's it to you that people post on CC? if you let some kids on a college help site annoy you so much, then maybe the get a life statement can go both ways. and just because we've gotten in doesn't mean we don't have valid questions. Also, we can come around and help people with the knowledge that we've gained. Who's going to say that YOUR questions are better than bigtwix's? just chill and let whoever post however many posts they want.</p>