¡Bienvenido a McGill!

McGill wouldn’t be Canada’s #1 university without its students’ outstanding academic performance. As expected from a top-level university, everything at McGill is competitive; from admissions, building your schedule, to in-class participation. The university is divided into several faculties, offering both undergraduate and graduate programs. In the following paragraphs, we will give you a brief insight into the most common faculties at McGill although before getting to that, we will share some general information with you that is really helpful for incoming students:

• Choose your courses wisely! If you need help, McGill advising services are always there for you
• Organize your work/readings properly! If you leave everything for the week before the midterm or final, you will suffer.. Trust us.
• If possible, have a good relationship with your professors, they are always available during office hours to answer any questions you may have. A good relationship with them may open the door for internships in the future.
• At all costs maintain a good relationship with your TAs (Teaching Assistant), they are the ones who grade your exams! TAs are usually Master’s or Ph.D. students that work closely with the professors and do the grading. They hold office hours and weekly tutorials (called conferences) where they discuss class topics and sometimes even give tips on how to study for a test/what they will be grading. It’s so much easier to establish a relationship with them since they understand you; they are students as well and know McGill is a hard university. Don’t expect any level of mercy from them, since their job is to grade as fair as possible according to the professor’s grading criteria.

As always, if you have any extra questions about the faculties or academics in general, feel free to message us on Facebook or email us! We are proud to have Executive members in almost all faculties, who will be more than happy to answer any of your doubts.

ARTS

This is the largest faculty at McGill and the one with the widest variety of programs. The arts faculty covers aspects that usually are subject to discussion and debate, which are skills that art students will develop throughout their studies at McGill. The most popular programs in this faculty are Economics, Political Science, International Development Studies and Psychology, nevertheless this faculty also covers all the Social sciences, literature and language programs at McGill. The Arts faculty has courses in almost any interest you could imagine. Even if you Major in one specific area you can still take classes in other subjects and even have a Minor in it even if it belongs to another faculty.

As an Arts student, you can expect to have a large number of readings to do before each class, and you should be ready to discuss and debate those readings in the weekly tutorials with your TAs. The most necessary skill for an art student is university-level essay writing, a skill you will develop with time. If English or French isn’t your first language, there are a lot of resources at McGill to make life easier for you, such as the McGill Writing Centre, as well as the TA’s office hours where they may give you tips on structuring your essay… or if you are lucky, some professors even dedicate an entire lecture to essay writing tips, which is VERY useful for international first-year students at McGill!

SCIENCE

This faculty covers all aspects of Science, from hard sciences to biological sciences, this faculty has it all. If you don’t have high school credits (IB, French BAC, AP, O-levels, etc.) you will need to complete U0, which includes pre-requirements for this faculty. These requirements include Math, Physics, Biology, and Chemistry. After that year, the courses you take are fully dependent on your major and minor. There is a wide variety of courses you can take in this faculty, and besides that, we get several electives, so you can always explore certain classes from other faculties.