Attending McGill

It is april and this month, as I am bothered by final examinations and moving out of my residence room, I will write an article of shameless promotion for my educational institutional.

My first year of university has ended. I attend McGill University in Montréal, Province of Québec. I choose to attend McGill University because, well, after nineteen years in Ontario I needed out. My top choices for university had been the Université de Montréal, McGill University, Université de Québec à Montréal and Dalhousie. Last year, during my OAC year, when it came time to send out aplications of those universities I only applied to University of Montreal and McGill. I had also applied to Universities in Ontario I had no intention of attending - Guelph, Ottawa, Queen's, York. I didn't even bother applying to University of Toronto, because I wanted out of Ontario, and out of Toronto even more. Not that there was anything wrong with Toronto, or Ontario, but after living your whole life in one city, change is needed. I first though of attending U. de M. but they didn't offer me a room in residence and since I had no idea how to find a place in Montreal, I choose to attend McGill, which had given me guarenteed residence.

McGill is Quebec's oldest english-language post-secondary school (Laval is the oldest francophone university) in 1821. The land of the downtown campus was given by James McGill who upon his death in 1813 gave his land for an academic institution. It took until 1821 to be chartered and until 1829 to begin instruction. McGill has a registered population, of about 30,000 students both, full-time and part-time, undergraduate and graduate.

While McGill's population is about sixty per cent local (Quebecois- anglophone or francophone) they tend to be the silent ones, making McGill, seemingly composed of Ontarians and Americans. People from all around the world come to McGill and is attractive as a place to gain entrance to North America without paying American prices. From what I know, that is also why Americans, mostly from New England, venture north: the Internation student fee (about 10 grand) is cheaper than American schools that don't even have the reputation McGill has.

McGill students at least initially, tend to hold high, exagerated esteem, for the univeristy, feeling unworthy of being at such a place, and uttering sentences like "I must be smart, I got into McGill" as well as holding contempt for Queen's and Concordia, the first of which is seen as that white-WASPy school in a case of kettle-pot calling.

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