mcgillguy

I haven’t been writing much lately, but there’s a reason. I’ve been busy prepping for fall already. “Already?” you ask, innocent incredulity flooding every capillary of your being. “Already.” I reply, in a very meh-way. It’s not such a big deal. With about 5 pages a day over about 3 months, that’s 450 pages right there. Which gives you plenty of time to relax and read each little tricky corner of your book. Me, I’m doing Elements of Biotec and Materials Science for my chemical engineering classes in September, but I think I could easily handle another. I’m also spending the rest of my time reading books which you can’t say have any academic import, but which do make summer enjoyable. Good books, and iced-tea. Life is such.

Once upon a glorious time a programming course on Fortran (technically, I should spell it in all upper-case, but that’s plain rude) and C. Fortran I could live with. I mean, I didn’t outright love it, but I could stand being around it, may be even catch an iced-tea together and banter about cricket. Now C. C I did not see eye to eye with. I’m one of those Indians who’re not very good at programming. What’s worse, I’m an engineer. There must be a scholarship program somewhere that recognises me as a minority, just for this. I was sitting in the library one day when this totally random (‘random’ is such a McGillism) guy asks me if I could help him with his computer, which I was able to. National pride left intact for another day.

Programming was taught by a young Asian prof who started his first class with the history of computing. He tells us about IBM, HP, MS, and so on. Then he asks, “So right now, which is the most important company in the world?” and without waiting for an answer, sweeps his coat aside like Superman to show us his T-shirt – “Google!”.

If you get into McGill engineering, you’ll probably be recommended to buy a laptop.

Good advice, but do not, under pain of frustration, go for the faculty laptop. In my year, it was the Toshiba Tecra M5 (it moves up a few marks a year). The battery is abysmal and will fail you after a year and some months (that is to say, after the warranty expires). It overheats. It’s clunky and slow. So yes, do go for a laptop, but not this one. Dell, HP, and other Toshiba ranges are a good idea. You’ll miss the student discount, but it’ll save you hours of annoyance. Oh and, forget about Windows if all you can get is Vista. It’s either XP or Linux. And don’t pay for MS Office. It’s overpriced and OpenOffice will do the same things for free.

Actually, no. Upper Residences have about eight hundred students, almost all freshmen, between them. However, be it known that it is 25 minutes from the campus on a quick day. Thou hast been warned.

PHYS 141, electromagnetism. The prof carried a backpack. In fact, most of our TAs carried a backpack. Almost every grad student I saw, to be honest, had a backpack. You know those girls in the movies that carry two files in their anorexic arms to show they’re college students? Lie. They’re either not studying at all or they have a photographic memory into which they scanned all their enormous tomes at the beginning of the year. If you come to college, bring a backpack. A strong one. One that will hold Serway and Jewett and Morrison and Boyd and Resnick and Halliday. Notice from the name of these books that it takes at least two people just to write these books; obviously it should take a greater number to haul them. Except Perry’s Handbook of Chemical Engineering, which isn’t a handbook unless you are that character from the Lord of the Rings. No, not Aragorn. Treebeard. Mr. Perry was obviously a man to be reckoned with.

Also on the menu was MATH 133, a course on linear algebra that has the dubious reputation of being the only course in a McGill engineer’s academic career that has never, ever, had a good professor. Ok, that’s an exaggeration. It did have at least one good professor, Dr. Charles Roth, and I had signed up for another guy’s class (no names, but for the sake of argument, let’s call him Larry King on Steroids). By the end of the year, Prof. Roth’s class was overflowing with so many students from the other session that the University had to place a restraining order on us to herd us back to our assigned shepherd.

ICE is a filter course – it separates the engineers from the mortals. Thermo, which comes later, is the filter course. Other filter courses include Mechanics 2 (in mechanical engineering), Intro. to Computer Engineering and FEE (both in electrical) and Psyc 100 (psychology).

My first class in my first Fall here was calculus, taught by Dr. Lauve (pronounced ‘Love’, I jest you not). I also had the innocently named Introduction to Chemical Engineering (ICE), which by the end of the year I had re-expanded to Intense Concussion Expected. Our professor was the nicest person in the world, the soul of compassion, a veritable Dalai Lama of patiently explaining energy flows and mass balances for the eighteenth time in a row. Till the exam. Then she really put you through the fire. Expect that at McGill.

I came to Canada in September 2006. That is fall. I completely failed to recognise this for several Septembers in a row before that, given that I used to live in the Emirates, where the seasons are Summer, SummerLite, and Summer XXL. I would have conveniently overlooked the same in Montreal too, had it not been for the fact that McGill University repeated the word often enough for me to remember it. As our chemistry professor Dr. Perepiichka would note later, it was an effective pedagogic method.