McGill is a Paradise

You wake up in a cold sweat. “McGill is the best university in Canada,” you whisper to yourself, clutching your Super Puff like a life raft. You try to convince yourself it’s true, but the voices in your head keep chanting “non-target… non-target…” until you finally silence them with a deep dive into Queen’s and Western LinkedIn placement stats to motivate yourself.

You slam your laptop shut. “I’m not like the others. I can make it out.”

It’s -17°C, the sidewalks are black ice, and you’ve worn the same salt-stained Blundstones since Frosh. You trek to Bronfman Basement, tripping in front of a group of first-years still naive enough to think it’s too early to start thinking about full-time. You’re not embarrassed - this is the first thing you’ve felt since you watched a Western sophomore post their Goldman return offer in September.

As you continue on your way, you cut through Schulich Library. You see your engineering friend hunched over some hellish thermodynamics equation. You smirk. They’ll never understand the mental fortitude required to perfectly calculate $10 of depreciation.

You stop at Couche-Tard for a $1 coffee that tastes like melted batteries, before heading into the HIM bunker - the windowless, oxygen-deprived lair in Bronf where dreams go to die. The stench is indescribable - despair and asbestos. The members down there have adapted to it. You haven’t. Not yet.

You ask yourself the eternal McGill finance question: MIC? RPC? HIM? Or all three to maximize the probability that no one cares? Of course, joining any of the big finance clubs means silently engaging in the great Cold War of McGill’s business scene - a rivalry so petty it makes high school drama look soft. You tell yourself you’re above it all, but you still clock who’s clustered together at Gerts, whose LinkedIn posts get mysteriously fewer likes, and who’s suddenly “too busy” to come to your event after joining another club.

It’s 10:32 AM on a Tuesday in MGCR 341. All of your 92 scheduled networking emails have just sent out. One reply. It’s another alum in NYC politely explaining that their bank no longer hires Canadians. You immediately add them to your “never speaking again” list.

You pull up WSO and see McGill listed in the same tier as Waterloo. Waterloo. You slam your fist on the desk, whispering “Top 3 school” like a prayer.

You reassure yourself with talk of “pipelines” - the one sacred, protected pipeline that still hasn’t been touched. But every other supposed “pipeline” we brag about? Cannibalized by Queen’s and Laurier each year. And Queen’s gets closer to breaching the last one every year.

Noon hits. You head to Gerts to drink away your worries. The bar is closed. You consider a $5 grilled cheese in memoriam before your coffee chat with a Queen’s alum who has graciously agreed to “give back.” They cancel last minute and never reschedule. You stalk their LinkedIn that night to see if they connected with a Western kid instead. They did.

Defeated, you shuffle into Redpath Library. You skim the BIWS guides and tell yourself that three months ago, you didn’t even know what a DCF was - but now? Now you can totally catch up to the Western kids who were doing paper LBOs in grade 10. You tell yourself that anyway, while Western and Queen’s are sending out perfectly sharpened technical weapons, you have something more important: a wonderful personality. But every “We regret to inform you…” email slices another chunk off that personality until you’re just a hollowed-out LinkedIn Premium subscription with legs.

At 5 PM, you speed-walk to a Bronf breakout room to “mock” with your upper-year mentor. They tell you it’s all about “prepping for first rounds.” You both know first rounds will never come.

By 1 AM, you’re laying on your bed-bug infested McGill Ghetto mattress, scrolling through LinkedIn. Ding. Ding. Ding. US friends who’ve never heard of a DCF, posting about their Evercore offers.

You bury your head under your pillow. You tell yourself this is all temporary. That you’ll break into New York. That the HIM bunker smell will fade from your memory.

It won’t.

McGill is a Paradise.