“The Best Four Years of Your Life”, Part 2: My McGill Persona
In Part 1 of my University Experience series, I shared a bit about how I got to where I am today (Montreal, McGill specifically). Now to the important part: what exactly do I do here?
The Defining Decision: Picking Your Major
I joined the Arts faculty at McGill in the Fall of 2018. As an out-of-province student without a substantial amount of transfer credits from AP or IB, you start as a U0 student, which is basically a freshman student who takes all the fundamental introductory courses with no declared majors or minors. As a U0 student in Arts, I was able to take pretty much any intro course I wanted, so I mostly took a few maths, an econ course, a psychology course and a computer science course. Going into my freshman year I already knew that I wanted to declare a Psychology major at the end of the year, hence the introductory psych course. In an unexpected turn of events, the intro computer science course made me re-evaluate my whole future. I enjoyed it enough to the point where I decided that I wanted to declare a Computer Science major and officially started my journey to becoming a woman in STEM. This contradicted my stubborn desire to “never do anything relating to the sciences”, but thanks to Giulia Alberini, my COMP 202 professor, I realized that this was the right path for me.
I want to stress that it’s never too late to decide you want to change your major or go down a different path. A lot of people are intimidated by pushing back graduation, staying in school for a few extra years, or being looked down upon for not having everything figured out. The truth is that most people enter university uncertain about what they want to do with the rest of their lives, excluding the people who have known exactly what they wanted since they were 5 years old. It’s better to take the extra time to study something that interests you, rather than spend a few bleak years stuck in a field you don’t care about.
All that to say, I’m currently in my last semester at McGill studying Computer Science in the Faculty of Science. Wait, what? How did I get from the Faculty of Arts to the Faculty of Science? Well, that’s a whole story on it’s own.
The Transfer Dilemma
As you could probably guess from my desire to stay away from the sciences, I wasn’t really interested in taking any of the optional science courses in high school, which pretty much included everything — biology, chemistry and physics. As an Arts student, you are only required to take one science in U0, which can be chosen from a list of classes including sciences made for arts students (a.k.a people like me). When I decided to declare a CS major instead of psychology, there wasn’t much that I needed to change in my curriculum, but when I decided I want to be a CS major in the Faculty of Science instead of Arts, that’s when things got a bit complicated.
As a Science student, you are required to pick a group, and CS fell under the Physical, Earth, Math and Computer Science Group (no surprise there). To transfer to Science and into this group, you need to have completed at least 2 sciences and 2 maths, with a minimum of a B in each class, and a cGPA of 3.0. This seems pretty standard, but for a person who never took high school sciences, this was quite a challenge.
In my second year I was declared a CS major in the Faculty of Arts. I remained in Arts since I couldn’t transfer to Science right away, with my lack of required courses. I spent the year really focusing on meeting those requirements and doing well in the classes that I needed so that I could finally transfer in my third year.
There continues to be a lot of confusion and question around the difference between a Bachelor of Arts degree and a Bachelor of Science degree for CS. Ultimately, there is no “better” faculty, the choice is yours, and I felt that the science curriculum suited me more. In Arts, since the major is a lot less credits (36) compared to in Science (63), they require you to also declare at least 1 minor in another discipline. I’m someone who really likes to focus on a specific thing, and would rather have the option to take multiple electives from other subjects that I enjoy rather than to be forced to take a specific amount of credits for a topic that I’m slightly interested in, therefore I thought being a pure Computer Science major, with no minor, in the Science faculty, was the best decision for me.
If you’re in a similar situation and find yourself debating over which degree best suits you, this is what I have to say about it: At the end of day, the courses you take are the same, and the knowledge you end up with is the same. Most jobs these days don’t specify that they need a particular degree, just that you’re studying something relating to Computer Science or STEM. I think we’re past the point where a Science degree is found more prestigious than an Arts one, especially for something like CS, where there are plenty of qualified people without a university degree.
If you’re interested in multiple disciplines and want your university experience and course load to be diverse, I highly recommend an Arts degree. They have the largest number of programs, whether it be to major or minor in, and you have the ability to be credited for one of your interests. Isn’t it cool to say you have a minor in philosophy? On the other hand, if you’re like me, and prefer to concentrate your course load on a specific subject, with the option to take electives in anything you want, a Science degree is great for you. Here is a good resource to take a look at that outlines the different program options available for CS at McGill.
What My Minerva Schedule Looked like
As I mentioned before, regardless of the degree you choose, the courses offered by the School of Computer Science are the same. I’m going to give you a breakdown of what each of my semesters looked like in terms of course-load, and the classes I loved, didn’t love, really didn’t love, and where I had no idea what was going on.
Here is an overview of all the courses I took over my 8 semesters, excluding Calculus 3 which I took during the Summer 2020 semester. I decided not to include it in this image because I didn’t want the rows to be uneven, ruining the aesthetic, of course. The semesters in red were fully online and those in blue were hybrid.
My first few semesters consisted of a very varied course load. Because of the nature of “U0” in Arts, I was mostly taking random introductory courses in my first year, as well as electives since I hadn’t declared a major yet. In Fall 2019, I took CHEM110 and MATH133 as the required math + science courses I needed for my transfer into the Faculty of Science. I decided to only take 4 classes that semester so that I could really focus on doing well in those classes and getting the required mark I needed to transfer. That was the first semester where I felt like I had a good grasp on study habits that worked for me, and I ended up doing a lot better than I had in my first year.
Something very important that I realized was this: you do a lot better in the classes that you’re actually interested in, regardless of the difficulty level. I’ve seen a common theme at McGill where people tend to look for “bird” courses to fill up their schedule; although this seems like a fair strategy to ensure a good GPA, if you’re not really interested in the material of these so-called “free” courses, it’s not as easy as you think to do well, because you will lack the motivation to do so. From my own transcript, it was clear that I did significantly better in the courses relating to my major than I did in electives, even though they would seemingly be considered “harder”.
The Covid Era Semesters
The following semester was the semester that Covid hit; the last month of the semester moved online, but it initially started out pretty rough. I just want to give a shoutout to MATH 240 for being the scariest class I’ve taken at McGill. Prior to taking the class, I had heard so many bad things about it; it was famous for being notoriously hard, being a “proofs”-centered class and carrying a C/C+ average every semester. I went into the class with this in mind, so I definitely spooked myself out. I ended up really enjoying the class, as surprising as it sounds. Prior to moving online, I felt like I had figured out a good study routine for the class, and I felt comfortable enough with the material to do well on the midterm and on assignments. That being said, I’m still extremely thankful that the final exam ended up being online, and saved me the horrors of an in-person final.
Winter 2020 was also the first semester where the school put into place the new “S/U Option”, where you could choose to S/U (pass/fail) a class after receiving your grade for the class, including classes needed for your major. This was unheard of prior to Covid, but the school sympathized with us students and offered this option as a little positive reinforcement during the difficult transition to online classes. You can bet that I definitely took advantage of this opportunity, and I ended up pass/failing COMP 273. No hate to that class at all — I want to iterate that my poorer-than-usual mark in that class stemmed purely from a lack of interest. There is a consensus among many CS students that this class is their least favourite; it covers a lot of low-level hardware stuff, like circuits and assembly language, which a lot of people don’t find interesting or useful. On the hand, this is some people’s favourite class because they enjoy learning about a computer system at the CPU level. Either way, it’s a required class for the major in Science, so I would recommend trying to find ways to do well, even if you hate it.
My favourite semester, course-wise, was definitely Winter 2021, the second semester of my third year. It was also the heaviest. It was a semester full of COMP courses, some required and some complimentary. Out of all the COMP courses I took, COMP 303 and COMP 421 were my favourite. You can pretty much associate my interest with the level of usefulness I find the course to have because these two courses are definitely the ones where I have actually used the skills and knowledge I acquired on tasks outside of school work. When I took these courses, they were purely assignment-based, with no midterms or final exams. I personally prefer these kinds of evaluations for applied COMP courses because they are opportunities to actually apply what you’ve learned so far, whereas exams are more suited for theory based classes.
Outside of taking classes for your majors or minors, I think it’s fun to take advantage of the wide range of available courses in different departments and widen your course repertoire. If you’re taking a course that you wouldn’t normally take and are worried about it affecting your current GPA, I highly recommend utilizing the standard S/U option, which allows you to choose the pass/fail grading scheme for 1 elective course each term, up to 10% of the credits for your degree. In my current semester, I decided to take PSYC 471, an upper-level psych course on Human Motivation. Even though I don’t have a psychology background, the topic of this course really interested me and I wanted to indulge in an intriguing class without worrying too much about my grade, so I decided to S/U it.
Your Curriculum is in Your Hands
If you’re doing CS in the Faculty of Science, you get around 30 credits of complimentary courses, which are essentially any 300+ level COMP courses of your choice. The biggest struggle is choosing the complimentary courses that are the triple threat: interesting, useful and not ridiculously hard. The courses I chose to take were: COMP 417, COMP 421, COMP 424, COMP 445, COMP 451, COMP 550, and COMP 598, on top of the “required” complementaries, MATH 323, COMP 350 and COMP 360. I would say that most of the courses met at least 2 out of the 3 criteria, but the format of the courses when I took them were very different from what they might have been before, since they were delivered completely online.
When choosing the courses you want to take, I highly recommend taking advantage of the add-drop period to look at different course syllabi and ask around before deciding which courses may be right for you, and which courses to take together. Some classes also have different professors based off the semester, and this can change everything; even when it comes to required courses, you want to try your best to take it at the right time, and with the right professor. When it comes to COMP courses, you can expect the type of assessments to be pretty standard across the board: programming or theoretical assignments, quizzes, final projects or final exams, depending on the topic. Once you do a few of them, you get the hang of the format of the courses and can start focusing on which topics interest you.
I tried my best to space out my classes and balance them out with electives here and there to ensure a reasonable course load. I also decided it would be best for me to get all the required courses out of the way as soon as I could so I could focus on taking the classes I was really interested in towards the end of my degree and relieve the stress of fulfilling my program requirements. Once you get closer to the end of your degree, you don’t want to stress about not being able to get into a course you really need, or not being able to fit things into your schedule, which can delay your graduation and complicate your future plans.
The “core” part of your undergraduate experience can be seen as the actual school part, which I just blabbered on about, but the part that you’ll actually remember once you leave is all the parts that don’t revolve around academia. There’s so much that goes on outside of the classroom; read about the rest of my student life experience in Part 3. 🌇