Bienvenue à Poly

I started the Masters Research Program in Biomedical Engineering on Tuesday (officially...I only had class on Wednesday). Tuesday consisted largely of administrative things.

So far, here's what I can say:
1) Compared to the English universities in Montreal, Poly's administration is a whole lot more efficient and polite. Every time I've gone to inquire about things or drop things off, I've been greeted nicely and everything is done quickly. They also don't charge you for attestations of full-time study.
They also try really hard to be welcoming. For orientation they organized a kind of info session about biomed with free beverages and pastries. Then we got a free lunch that consisted of salads and meat and also dessert. For veg's they gave pizza. Granted, it wasn't a very good tasting pizza...but hey they tried!

ETS also seems to be pretty efficient...but I was only there for 20 minutes today. So I'll have to gather more observational data while I'm there taking my class.

In contrast, Concordia charged me 10$ each time for attestations and they're also incredibly slow. They also seem generally grouchy. There are some really awesome profs there though.

But, this doesn't even compare to McGill. They are THE SLOWEST university EVER. They still haven't given me a letter saying whether or not I can do a masters there :P Oh, well McGill. It's too late! I would say it's only their administration that's slow, but no, at least some of their profs are equally slow.

2) The campus of University of Montreal encourages physical fitness - the entire thing, is uphill and Poly is on the highest part of the hill. Biking up there is quite a challenge and so is walking (to some extent). Even if you take the subway, you have to go through the ramp and then walk up 10 flights of outdoor stairs to get to the main building. Luckily the other building, Pavillon Lassonde is not that high. One advantage of the height is the nice view of the city though.

3) Pavillon Lassonde the most colorful university building I've ever laid my eyes on. Each floor is a different color - there's red, green, blue, orange, though bathrooms are grey. The bathrooms are entirely automatic - automatic flushing, automatic tap, automatic paper towels and the super high power hand dryers that deform your hand so that it looks like you have moon craters forming in them. There are escalators going up, but none going down. It was built to be ecological, which brings me to my next point.

4) Poly is really trying hard to be ecological. They have lots of bike racks and there are bikes you can borrow for free to ride around campus to get from building to building. There are recycling bins everywhere, clearly indicating what type of material goes in what. There's an entire website dedicated to being ecological.
In the Graduate Student handbook it says you can borrow a set of reusable containers while you're there. There's also a coop there. And if you use reusable containers/cups, I hear that whatever you ordered is of reduced price. I have yet to investigate all their enviro stuff, but it seems really awesome that they're so dedicated to it.

5) Poly is as multicultural as Concordia but in a different way that makes sense. Concordia has a large arab, indian and chinese population. Poly has lots of quebecois, vietnamese, french speaking arabs, french speaking africans and then a few other groups scattered around.

6) I've only had one class so far, but the teacher is reaaaaaaaally queb. It amuses me because I'm so used to being taught in English that it's something new. I'm used to I guess what you'd call international French and though I live in Montreal, I'm pretty unfamiliar with the slang and expressions used by the French speaking population here. Some things go over my head. Some things I knew they said before, but it's still fun :) I'll see how the other teachers are. I haven't made any friends yet, so I haven't been able to assess my comprehension in a conversation really. I mean, I spoke to one person during orientation, but then when I didn't know how to say one word in French, he completely switched to English and so my experiment was over. I've spoken to administration, but they usually don't use much slang...so yeah.

That's it for now. I should take some pics of the campus at some point I guess. But then I'll look like an uber-tourist. I'm quite pleased about taking a course at ETS. I'll get to try out two universities at once :D Once I finish my Masters, I will have tried 3/4 Montreal Uni's :D!