Now that graduation lurks around the corner, I can't help looking back on the last four years. For the most part, they've been rough and fraught with difficulty-I even left McGill for a short time in 2006. But as my loan counsellors start to demand repayment and my diploma is being printed, I can't help wondering what my time and money (and my parents money) has bought me. The only answer that I can come up with is this ode to four years wasted on a shamefully mediocre education.
Last fall, I had the pleasure of catering the music faculty's convocation ceremony. In between pouring wine and serving canapés, I caught some of the remarks meant for students and parents. "McGill's star is rising," one of the Deans insisted, quoting the Times Higher Education Supplement's ranking of McGill as one of the top 25 universities in the world. Whatever mathematical algorithm of library volumes and research dollars the Times used, it certainly was not speaking to the average undergraduate experience at this university.
In a shameful pyramid scam, undergraduate tuition dollars (particularly those of international students) pay a huge number of salaries at this university, while the majority of the university's resources and energy go towards funding graduate students and showering honours undergraduates with special treatment. Lost in a bureaucratic maze of nightmare advisors and unqualified doctoral students, the average McGill co-ed is a neglected species in an immense, dark jungle.
In the political science department, the smallest non-honours undergraduate class in the winter of 2008 had 55 seats. In the fall of 2007, it was 59 seats. In my final year in the program, I have not had a single tenured faculty member as a professor, nor have I been able to register for a single small-group seminar. I hated the political science department with such intensity that I actually had to pick another major. When I toured McGill, our student-guide showed off Leacock 132 and then insisted that upper-year classes got much smaller. She lied.
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