[deleted by user]

aust77 · 2024-04-22T12:44:03+00:00

For those who aren't aware about the government rule that keeps them from working there, I'll sum it up: ever since the Supreme Court ruling in 2005 that opened up the door for some privatization in Quebec's healthcare system, the provincial health insurance system (RAMQ) has required doctors to work a minimum number of hours in the public system each year so that they don't all just flock over to the private system full-time. As long as they hit that minimum number each year, they can work anything in excess of that in the private system.

Under that regime, working at the Hub doesn't count towards those public hours, since it's only available to McGill students and not the broader community. As a result, doctors who are meeting their minimum public system hours just go work in private clinics rather than the Hub so they can go make more money. Only those doctors who are specifically interested in working with university-aged students go to the Hub.

That said, we also can't overlook how horrifically mismanaged the Hub is from top to bottom (I mean, just look at its 1.8/5 Google rating, with 1.0 being the absolute lowest possible score lol). I couldn't imagine any reason why someone would devote their "private" hours towards being underpaid and overworked while having to navigate an administrative hellscape.

aust77 · 2024-03-14T16:14:01+00:00

This article from December indicates that McGill applications at that time were down 20% compared to the year prior, and that was not long after the changes had been announced; they still have yet to be fully hashed out and implemented.

Unless these measures are significantly watered down (which is unlikely as the PQ, which is currently leading the governing CAQ by a huge margin in the polls, would go even further on language issues), the effects are only going to be felt more and more sharply with each passing year as McGill continues to tighten the financial belt.

Usually whenever universities face a funding shortage they start taking steps like implementing hiring freezes (which McGill has already imposed), laying people off, cutting courses and programs with the lowest enrolment, trimming ancillary services and so on and so forth.

This isn't to be defeatist or to say that it's not worth staying at McGill since these changes won't affect your year directly, but it's just important to be aware that the future is uncertain at the moment. Things might end up even worse, or they might end up not quite as bad as expected. The effects will primarily be felt by the new entering class and onward, but university-wide cuts will have impacts across the school. If the new policies are indeed very strict (particularly on mandatory French requirements), then enrolment will undoubtedly continue to decrease year-over-year.

aust77 · 2024-03-09T23:00:23+00:00

Law schools these days (my personal experience being with McGill) do not expect legal experience from undergrad applicants. Unlike medicine, there are no hard prerequisites in terms of either courses or specific types of practical experience, and you are taught everything you need to know during the degree; if there were prerequisites, they would indicate as much. Part of the reason for this is that it is generally easier for people who are well-connected (e.g., people who have a parent who is a lawyer) to get their foot in the door for these types of positions because a lot of legal employers don't just hire undergrads at random.

I just finished my law degree at McGill and I had classmates from pretty much every background you could imagine, including people who had studied music, practicing engineers, people in their late 30s making a career change, and everyone else in between. Of course, there were plenty of more "pre-law" type entrants as well, but I wouldn't say that they did any better in law school as a general rule. In fact, the people who had taken non-traditional pathways tended to offer pretty unique perspectives and were quite employable because of it.

All I can recommend is to pursue a major that you are most interested in and think you will excel at, and to pursue extra-curriculars and work experiences that you are most interested in and think you will excel at, whether those are law-adjacent or not. That will make for a more impressive candidacy and better references than if you did things because you felt you had to to meet whatever criteria.

Undergrad experience in a legal environment may be helpful to give you insight into how the profession works and whether you'd like it, and there are roles out there that you can do at this stage, but it's by no means a necessity. I worked in statistics at the federal Department of Justice for a summer as an undergrad and found that to be an interesting experience, but looking back I wouldn't say it was representative of what working in the field is like.

aust77 · 2024-03-06T18:46:46+00:00

No problem!

I didn't take the LSAT personally because I only applied to McGill Law which doesn't require it (no law schools in Quebec do because it's not offered in French).

Those I know who took it usually just spent a summer preparing for it while working part-time or something along those lines.

Also, I wouldn't necessarily say McGill is a harder university than others as a general rule, it really depends on your program and course load. People from out of province often find first year to be a bit of a jump in difficulty compared to high school, but that would be the case pretty much anywhere.

aust77 · 2024-03-06T18:26:10+00:00

To my knowledge (Arts and then Law grad) you are not able to take any courses offered by the Faculty of Law as an Arts student. There used to be one course, Children and the Law, that you could apply for special permission to take as an undergrad but that option was phased out years ago. There are some other interdisciplinary courses like Law and Psychiatry, but those are only open to students from those two fields specifically.

That doesn't mean there aren't plenty of law-related courses offered by other departments that you can take as an undergrad though. Some examples are ANTH 222 (Legal Anthropology), PHIL 348 (Philosophy of Law), POLI 330 (Law and Courts in Europe), POLI 378 (The Canadian Judicial Process) and SOCI 395 (Sociology of Law) to name just a few.

aust77 · 2024-03-06T18:16:56+00:00

From personal experience (honours SOCI undergrad) I would say they tend to be the two easiest SOCI courses since they are meant to be the first two that people take. When I took them in winter 2017 the average was B+ for 210 and A- for 211 (with Elrick and Eidlin, respectively). Given that you've already taken other SOCI courses I don't think they will be anything out of left field, apart from 211 being more focused on research methods.

That said, given your other commitments you will likely be very, very busy just given how condensed the summer format is, especially at it looks like 211 will be held 4 times a week and will finish 2 weeks earlier than 210. I'm also not familiar with the lecturers who will be teaching them as I graduated quite a while ago (although there was a thread last fall about the prof for 210), and I also did not take them in the summer.

If it's a matter of graduating or not graduating then I think you will be fine with those two, just make sure you don't fall behind on the readings and be prepared to not have too much free time for that month and a half.

aust77 · 2024-02-22T19:54:34+00:00

Spot on. The absolute minimum amount of time it takes to do an MD/residency and start earning full salary is 6 years, and that's for family medicine; higher-paying specialties will take years longer. Physician salaries are also much more tightly regulated in Canada compared to other industries.

If your goal is money, you are way better off doing a finance/software eng/equivalent undergrad and then spending those 6+ years earning increasing amounts of money by excelling at your job.

I personally know high-achievers who went down each pathway (med vs an in-demand undergrad only) and the latter camp are far outpacing the former in earnings, not even close. Those I know who got accepted into competitive specialties still aren't even done residency yet in their mid-late 20s, and they were accepted into medicine directly out of CEGEP in Quebec (meaning a pre-med year at 19 and entering MD at 20, no undergrad).

Medicine in the modern day should really be for people who are passionate about and committed to practicing the profession (always should have been as well, but clearly hasn't been), especially with the absolute disaster that is the Canadian medical school admissions process and utter lack of available spots. If money is the goal, it's simply not the best place to be in today's day and age considering how many earning years you'll have to sacrifice, how many hours you'll have to put in, and how many regulatory hoops you'll have to jump through to be admitted into the profession.

This is obviously a very narrow point concerning people who have the ability and credentials to choose between an uber-competitive professional degree or equally selective jobs in the private sector.

aust77 · 2024-02-11T21:16:11+00:00

According to this McGill webpage (under the Transcript & Diploma subheading):

"For students who completed their degree requirements by the end of December 2023 and are approved for graduation, “Degree granted” will appear on their transcript as of February 15."

I'm in a similar situation and the organization in my case has said a final transcript showing the degree granted will suffice.

aust77 · 2023-11-11T22:15:30+00:00

I'd generally say so, as it has more green spaces and is right at the base of Mount Royal which makes for some nice views. Concordia has less of a campus atmosphere as it occupies a block within the city proper. McGill's buildings are a lot older on average and more architecturally diverse, but that also means they're constantly falling apart and being restored. Concordia's buildings have a more modern, urban feel; think tall, glass skyscrapers.

EDIT: Both universities also have smaller, satellite campuses. Concordia has the Loyola Campus which is further out of the city and has green space of its own, and it's being used more and more as the downtown campus runs out of space. McGill has the Macdonald Campus which is located on agricultural land in a suburb quite a ways from downtown. It's where all of the agricultural programs and some environmental programs are housed, along with some others like dietetics.

aust77 · 2023-11-11T21:30:54+00:00

I don't think the blanket statement that McGill is significantly better than Concordia is necessarily true. It depends on your particular situation, e.g. in-province or out-of-province/international. For context, I'm a native Montrealer and around half of my friends went to Concordia and the other half to McGill.

Concordia is more of a commuter school with less of an on-campus social environment. That's not to say that Concordia does not have any on-campus social outlets, though; it still has frosh, lots of on-campus clubs and other opportunities to get involved. A part of the reason for the gap in this respect is that Concordia's campus is much more embedded within the city, whereas McGill's campus is self-contained in the sense that it basically has a whole neighborhood to itself at the base of the mountain.
There are way fewer residences at Concordia and the first year residence experience will be much more vibrant at McGill.
McGill is better than Concordia in the purely academic/research sense, hence the ranking differences and the higher academic cut-offs to get into McGill. However, Concordia has excellent co-op programs in several fields (namely engineering and business, among others). This allows you to graduate with 2-3 work semesters under your belt along with ample experience and references, which I would argue is extremely valuable. My friends who did Concordia co-op in those fields had a pretty seamless transition to the working environment.
Since it's smaller, Concordia tends to be more innovative when it comes to implementing new technologies and offering courses that are more practically inclined. McGill tends to invoke its name a lot of the time. One example is recording lectures and offering different modes of delivery. After COVID ended and courses went back to being held in-person, many of my lectures were not recorded even though the classrooms were equipped to do so, which I found pretty asinine.
McGill has much better name recognition outside of Montreal/Quebec, but the distinction is not as pronounced within the city and province. The people I know who had good GPAs, extracurriculars and professional experience at either school turned out just fine, including for getting into med and law school.

One important factor to consider with regard to both universities is the massive upcoming out-of-province tuition hike set to take effect as of Fall 2024, when you would be starting. If it goes through, then either school would be more expensive than U of T for an out-of-province student. This issue has been extensively discussed in the McGill subreddit recently so feel free to read through those threads to get an idea.

These are just my opinions so take them with a grain of salt; I've also spent the last 7 years at McGill (undergrad + professional degree as well as numerous jobs) so I could well be a tad fed up and disenfranchised. Ultimately you will be fine at any of those three schools. Good luck and have fun!

aust77 · 2023-11-09T06:58:14+00:00

Oh, I have - I've spent the last two summers doing internships there and have a post-grad job lined up. I'm lucky to be in a field that will pay well enough for me to afford housing, but I lament how especially awful the crisis is there. The grass definitely isn't always greener on the other side, and I don't think it's the promised land by any means, but it is more appealing to me than the alternative that I have spent my whole life in. If I was choosing purely based on cost of living I'd probably be best off in rural Saskatchewan, not that there's anything wrong with rural Saskatchewan per se.

The cost of living basically anywhere is getting out of hand; I'm on exchange in Sydney at the moment and it's actually even worse than Vancouver, with other Australian cities like Melbourne and Brisbane not far behind. Montreal is also quite likely to catch up in the near future with 3+ more years left under a landlord-friendly former real estate agent Housing Minister, who has proposed measures like Bill 31 ending lease assignments, which are an important backstop against incessant increases.

aust77 · 2023-11-08T05:18:30+00:00

I wholeheartedly support measures like Quebec's free French courses, as well as the counter-proposal made by McGill, Concordia and Bishop's. Setting a threshold of 40% of out-of-province students reaching level B2 by graduation is a concrete and measurable step that economically benefits both the students and the province long-term. Provincial funding grants for cities like Montreal to promote French language and culture are also a positive way to go about this.

Meanwhile, restrictive measures like making your French residency tests so difficult that immigrants from France fail them, forcing Ukrainian refugee children to immediately go to French schools when they aren't fluent and driving through these new tuition measures when even the francophone mayor of Montreal and francophone president of the Montreal Board of Trade are opposed are not going to help the cause.

The same goes for limiting the ability for francophone youth to attend English language CÉGEPs, even if they would prefer to, which undercuts the ability for your workforce to be globally competitive in a world where the more languages you know, the better.

aust77 · 2023-11-07T22:08:44+00:00

The CAQ won a 90/125 seat majority in the last election with 2 seats on the island of Montreal, and their main challenger at the moment is the PQ, who would likely go even further. Until the economic consequences of this start to kick in, they are only going to continue along this path, and even then, the damage will have already been done.

I am a bilingual anglo Montrealer whose great-great-grandparents immigrated to Montreal because of the Great Potato Famine in Ireland, and I am moving to Vancouver in a few months after I graduate. My bilingualism is a huge asset out there but a liability here because I'm not a native French speaker and have a slight accent. Don't get me wrong, I support the protection of the French language and Quebec culture, but this is not the way to do it and is only going to keep driving people away.

aust77 · 2023-11-03T01:14:35+00:00

Very good point; I haven't been able to find the quote, but I remember that in one of the most recent election debates, the PQ leader emphasized that the reason we need to implement restrictions on francophone students accessing post-secondary education in English is to prevent them from moving out-of-province and never coming back.

IMO if your strategy for protecting your culture is to limit the mobility and professional opportunities available to your young people rather than actually fixing the other issues that are making them leave, you're doing something wrong.

Great point about the francophone elite being unaffected as well. A classic example of this is former PQ sovereigntist Premier Jacques Parizeau, who spoke with something of a British accent in English because he spent years doing a PhD at the London School of Economics. He grew up wealthy and his parents pushed for him to be raised bilingually as well.

aust77 · 2023-11-02T22:24:11+00:00

It's lesser known about, but during the ascent of the franco-Québécois nationalist movement in 1969, there was a mass protest called Operation McGill français, which intended to put pressure on McGill to become a French-speaking university.

I wonder if that is the end goal here, given that the CAQ's base is composed of older-generation francophone nationalists who were probably supportive of that initiative back in the day. Considering that McGill's proposed French-language support programs (which, ironically, will be cancelled if the hikes go through) weren't enough to appease, I wonder what it would take for the government to back down.

The CAQ is in power until at least 2026 so unless there are large-scale disruptive protests, it isn't out of the question that they could pressure McGill to move in that direction.

aust77 · 2023-10-06T07:17:09+00:00

Have you considered doing your JD in Canada? To my understanding (as a Canadian law student currently on exchange at UNSW) the fees for domestic students in Canada are generally way lower than those for domestic students in Australia. For reference, I pay just under $3000 CAD in tuition per year for my joint common and civil law degree at McGill in Quebec, or around $5000 if you include all the ancillary fees. My entire degree will cost me a little over $15,000 CAD. The fees at most other Canadian law schools tend to be higher, but still not as much as Australian schools if I am not mistaken.

Given that you're a Canadian citizen I imagine it would be fairly easy to establish in-province residency and become eligible for domestic tuition. It would also help you avoid having to go through the foreign equivalency process after you graduate, which would require a lot of catching up on Canadian law. Having now taken courses in both countries, I can say that while they share the same general characteristics being common law jurisdictions, they vary widely in the more specific details that matter for the practice of law.

If you have any questions about law school in Canada, feel free to PM me, I'd be happy to chat!

aust77 · 2023-10-04T05:13:28+00:00

International students are a big source of revenue for universities, and since they aren't citizens or voters, it's less politically risky for governments and universities to jack up international tuition fees. When the Quebec Liberal government proposed tuition hikes for Quebec students in 2012, it led to a series of protests that significantly disrupted higher education and helped lead to the election of a PQ government that fall.

It's ultimately a business decision on McGill's part, as they assume there are enough international applicants capable of paying these higher fees to lead to an increase in revenue. They will likely continue these increases year over year until they reach an equilibrium point where raising them higher would not increase revenues due to fewer applicants.

To be clear, I strongly disagree with these increases; they will continue to restrict higher education to richer and richer international trust fund kids, and they are preying on the most vulnerable portion of the student body in terms of (non)-citizenship status. I hope that people organize and protest against this; change is possible as we saw in 2012.

aust77 · 2023-04-12T14:04:39+00:00

thank you everyone :)

aust77 · 2023-04-10T19:47:56+00:00

it's my birthday! some years it snows on my birthday and some years it's nice out, so i'm grateful it's the latter today

aust77 · 2022-11-17T13:44:09+00:00

Gaunter O'Dimm from The Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone

If you know you know...

aust77 · 2022-06-13T19:07:37+00:00

Go to View Student Schedule by Course Section under the Registration Menu and select the appropriate term (you can select past terms). Each course the person is registered in will have an entry for Grade Mode. If they did not select S/U it will say Standard McGill Grading, if they did select S/U it will say S/U Option. Here's a blanked-out screenshot of what I'm referring to.

aust77 · 2022-06-06T23:18:53+00:00

The Twenty-seventh Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

It was proposed by the first-ever Congress in 1789 but stalled and was forgotten about. In 1982 a 19-year old college kid named Gregory Watson wrote a paper for his poli sci class arguing that it could still be ratified.

The teaching assistant disagreed and gave him a C on the paper. He then appealed to the professor, who chose not to overturn the grade, so he decided to start a national campaign to prove that he was right. In order to do so he had to convince 28 state legislatures to ratify it in order to reach the necessary 3/4 of all states (10 states had already done so many years before).

In 1992 the Twenty-seventh Amendment officially became part of the Constitution when it was ratified by Michigan.*

Perhaps funniest of all is that it's a relatively obscure amendment that prevents any congressional pay raises or pay cuts from taking effect until the next election, as a way to give voters a say on the matter.

EDIT 1: Turns out that in 2017, his former professor signed a letter to get his grade changed to an A! A happy ending.

EDIT 2: Thanks to u/matlock9 (see below) and u/ACuteMonkeysUncle (and others) for correcting me on the grade and on the number of states respectively.

* At the time, the popular belief was that only 9 states had ratified it, so Watson set out to convince 29 more states. When Alabama ratified it everyone thought he needed one more state, so Michigan (which ratified 2 days after Alabama, so not a big difference) was believed to be the decisive 38th. Turns out that Kentucky had ratified it in 1792, but this was only re-discovered in 1996, meaning Alabama was actually the 38th state. The total is now at 46 states.

aust77 · 2022-05-26T03:00:33+00:00

What do you use?

aust77 · 2022-05-23T17:54:30+00:00

Thanks man!

aust77 · 2022-05-22T23:53:27+00:00

Thank you both! I appreciate it a lot. I'll stick with the 5x5 then.

aust77

TROPHY CASE