Commerce: program structure, international experiences, professional development

So we really have a nice crowd and it really speaks to the diversity of our university. So welcome all of you and now it's time for us. So my name is Patricia and I'm a recruitment and admissions officer here at McGill University and I would like to ask our wonderful academic advisor to turn on her camera so you can introduce yourself. There you go, Angela. Hi, I'm Angela. I'm a BCOM advisor. I'm a senior advisor in the Faculty of Management. I've been there for nine years and I'll probably talk a little bit more about all that a little bit later. Excellent. Thank you very much. And in the background, we have two students who will also be able to take some of your questions. So feel free, like I said, to type your question and as the questions come through, we will make sure to answer them at the end of the presentation. Okay. So we hope you enjoy the webinar and Angela, over to you. Okay, let's see. Making sure I'm doing this right. Yeah. Zoom, right? All the time. There we go. Yeah. So bear with us for a few seconds and that's also good because we'll be able to give other students a few seconds to log in because I do know that students have to have a second way of logging in. That's actually wonderful. There we go. We can see your presentation. Wonderful. Thank you, Angela. All right. Perfect. All right. So let's get started then. All right. Welcome, everyone. I see that we have a huge, diverse crowd here. So it makes it very difficult to tailor it, obviously. But just to get, I mean, a general idea, I don't know how many of you have accepted your offer, how many have not accepted your offer, you're still thinking about it. But I'm going to go through a general things here. So like I said, I'm a senior advisor in the BCom office. I've been there for nine years. Prior to this, I actually worked in real estate for two years. And before that, I worked actually at the other university down the street for 10 years. So I've been advising for a little while. So I've seen quite a bit. And I'd like to share my experience with you and a bit of the wisdom that we get. All right. So let me go. So to give you a general idea here, you'll see that our total number of students is actually very low in the Faculty of Management. We have a very small population, we only really admit about 700, 725 annually. A majority of our students still come from Quebec. So you make up a good portion of our students, but the internationals make up a huge other portion. I think that's actually very important and makes what the flavor of the faculty all about. So let me see now, I'll go on. I know there's a lot of stats and things like that. I think most of you are curious really to know more about this, about the credit breakdown. Everyone that enters into the Faculty of Management has to do 120 credits. Some of you say, yes, but I'm, you know, a U1, I'm admitted as a U1. That's true. That's where the advanced standing comes in. Coming from SEJA, French back, other things like that, you will be granted up to 30 credits. The rest of your credits are made up of core courses, including a course called BUSA 250, which is basically an introduction to career services, as well as resume writing and writing skills, things like that. You will be admitted into a three or four year program, and you'll be taking a maximum of 30 credits per year, that is 10 courses in your fall and winter term. Most courses are about three credits per course. I talk in generalities, of course. This is just to give you a big picture, because as you see, the breakdown beyond that, after the core, major or two concentrations, these are things that you discuss with an advisor later on, because that all changes the number of electives you have based on what you want to study and in what dosages, as I like to call it. And I'll talk a bit now about U0 versus U1. A lot of you do come in as U1, coming from high school, obviously. It's a four-year program. You may have some advanced standing, like those that are coming in, you know, from the US, things like that, have some advanced standing credits, maybe a couple of APs they've done. You still fall within that four-year, you will have advanced standing, but you're going to do sort of in between. So we got U0 and we have U1, and we have the in-betweens, as I like to say. It's not that clear-cut, and that's why we're here as advisors, to help you through that, to decipher what you have to take. Our website is actually also designed to give you sample schedules and things like that, to help you plan out your studies. On the next slide, I'll show you the sample schedule. But to give you an idea, a four-year program, you'll end up taking a couple of math courses. You'll be allowed to do a couple of core courses as well, which are an introduction to business. Then afterwards, you'll be able to do the rest. All the rest are electives out of our faculty, arts courses, science courses, whatever you really want to take. Then afterwards, as a three-year student, you know, most of your courses are core courses. So I'll show you actually on the next slide, as a U1, this gives you a bit of an idea of what you would be taking. You're going to explore all these topics and more, actually. This is just to give you a little bit of a sample, so you can touch on everything from accounting, to finance, to marketing, managerial economics. I know some of you from SAGE are like, but I did micro-macroeconomics. You did, but trust me, after a few, maybe about three, four courses, you'll be just as lost as everyone else. Have no fear. So yes, it gives you a good foundation doing marketing, doing managerial economics, micro-macroeconomics. In SAGEF or any other school, even APs will give you a good foundation, but you do have to do them still. Okay, now on to, after this is, this is a sample of what your first year would be like, a U1 year. So as a freshman, you would do a freshman year, then you would follow this schedule in your second year for those freshman students, and then the big decisions come. So you got lots of choices after that. That's when you decide if you want to do a major, if you want to do a major plus a concentration, and what are all these things, right? So a major is 10 courses in a subject. The way I like to say it is, if you're super passionate about something, you'll want to do a major in it. Concentrations are like minors in business. They are five courses, and you could actually do multiple different concentrations. You could do two concentrations, three concentrations even, which makes it a lot of fun. You could really tailor your degree, which I like. The actual minors, I'm skipping over honours for now, minors actually are out of faculty. So if you have that interest in computer science or in art history, you could actually do a minor outside the faculty. Actually, it's highly encouraged, to be perfectly honest. As for honours, I'm not going to go into a great detail. I really recommend that you do speak to an academic advisor about it, because there are many programs. There's the Honours Investment Management, which you wouldn't have to worry about right away. I know a lot of people, it's one of our big selling points, to be perfectly honest, is the Honours Investment Management, where you actually work with a real portfolio of real money. So a lot of students want to get in, but it is by application only. We accept 19 students annually, and it is a competitive process. You have to do a stock pitch and an interview. There's a lot of steps involved. As for the honours, we have Honours Economics, Joint Honours Economics, Accounting and Finance. These are very difficult programs. I don't like this. They're challenging. I know a lot of students say, I really want a challenge, but to be perfectly honest, it's not always what you expect. It is highly theoretical, and a lot of students that go into honours, it's because they want to do a PhD in economics later on. They want to do higher level studies in economics. But we have lots of cool things coming our way. We are going to be having the Retail Management major, as well as Business Analytics. These are the huge new ones that come around, and we just revamped the sustainability already. It was a new program to begin with, but we've actually revamped it to make it more business focused. So, there's a lot of interesting programs. You might have more trouble deciding when you think. All right, on to International Experiences. All right, I know that most of you are probably not in this frame of mind right now, given our current situation, unfortunately. I think a great part of being at McGill is actually that international experience, and we don't want to limit it to the classroom. So, there's so many different opportunities. We have lots of business partners across the world. We're hoping that by January, everything's going to be up and running. There's no guarantees, of course, with what's going on in the world, but these are business schools. You'll be able to actually take courses in business and transfer the credits back, and you'll be able to take electives as well, not just business courses. We have many different opportunities. If exchange is not something that you're super, you know, keen on, there's other shorter term things. There's summer programs in Brazil, Israel, these programs where you take two courses, one course, things like that in Montreal. Then you go to Brazil, same thing with Israel, and another very cool program is actually Dynamic Cities. I had the pleasure of actually joining the group in 2015 when I went to Hong Kong, Jakarta, and Bali. What you do is a group of 40 students all head out during spring break for one week. It's 11 days. It's a total whirlwind. You're actually visiting various industries and learn how business is conducted in these countries, and it's amazing how different it actually is. We don't have access to these things. Like, we went to the Hong Kong, basically, port of operations, their actual port. We met with the Canadian ambassador in Jakarta, and then afterwards, we went to the green school in Bali, which was entirely natural, built out of trees. It was a fascinating experience. We have lots of those opportunities. All right, and to help you along, that's what our team is about. We are academic advisors. We're here to give you that personal one-on-one. We have a small faculty, so we want to actually help you on an individual level. We have mandatory first-year appointments. Every new student that gets admitted, all 725 or more, we meet with every single one of you one-on-one to learn what are your goals, where you're going, to help you actually find that balance, that healthy balance, to be honest, how to plan your degree, talk about your exchange possibilities, things like that. We are helping you develop so that you could actually work with our sister officer, brother officer. I don't even know what to call them anymore. Oops, what happened to my presentation? Sorry, hang on. It must have crashed. All right, let's try that again. It says that there was a problem with Microsoft PowerPoint. Murphy's laws. How embarrassing. No, no worries. As you open it, I see some very good questions regarding majors and minors and all of that. I know you're going cover that soon. Thank you guys for your questions. We are monitoring the questions. We will make sure to address these at the end of the presentation. No worries at all. I know that we have addressed a few, but again, we're going to hold on to the bigger ones because they're very, very good questions that all of you would benefit from the answer. It's sometimes just easier to say things than just to type it. So, no worries, guys. Let's see. All right, is it back up and running? Yes. Okay. Oh, there we are. I see it. Two slides per screen, but it's okay. Oh, two slides per screen? No, okay. That's all right. Let me, all right. Oh, I see now. Hang on. Let me try to fix it then. There. Let's play from current slide. There we go. How about that? Let's see if this will work. I see there's a little bit of delay going. Yeah. Give some time to type their questions. Actually, as the, oh, okay. I'll ask you that question. Someone wants to know how many cats you have. You really don't want to know. I have five. There you go. That's the answer to that question. And with that commercial break, let's continue. I'm going to try to go back a slide, but it's not letting me. Oh, there it is. Okay. All right. I can't miss out on our Career Services team. They basically support your evolution from the very beginning. The cool part is you get in touch with them right from the very beginning. You take BUSA 250, which is a required course, and you actually get to work with them to work on resume writing, CV writing, interviews, things like that. They basically will help you from A to B, A to Z rather. So they also actually provide you a connection to alumni from around the world. Because we have people from all over the world that are graduating, a lot of these people are actually returning back to their own countries, and they actually keep in touch with us. And they're the ones who are in positions of hiring now. Now, I know a lot of you are probably saying, do you have a co-op program? I know, I'm sure it's in there. I didn't even look at the questions yet, and I'm sure it's there. No, we don't have a co-op program, unfortunately. But at the same time, it's not necessarily an unfortunate thing, because a co-op program actually has you do additional credits generally. So it's not necessarily true that it counts for credit in your actual program. So you have to be careful with these co-op programs. And also, we have a very small faculty, remember that. So we are able to work one-on-one with our students to help them find jobs. We have on-campus recruitment, off-campus recruitment. We go to New York, to Toronto, and we actually meet with employers. I went two years ago, before the pandemic hit, actually. We went to Toronto, met with all types of industries. It was fascinating, actually. And students have that opportunity to connect with employers and see if they like that kind of industry. Would they want to work in this industry? It's all about contacts. And I think that's what McGill does offer a lot of students also, because we're so international. I will go on, obviously, just to show you, like I was talking, a lot of our students actually go back internationally, but actually a lot more remain in Canada, surprisingly. So we have a good percentage that actually will stay here in Quebec at 57%. That's quite a high number of our grads staying here. And then afterwards, with the rest of Canada going at about 43%. So international, still pretty high. But overall, most do stay here, surprisingly. All right, next slide. Now, I think a lot of you are interested in these stats also, for sure. The average base salary. Now, this is a very rough estimate. It really depends on what you're studying, what you want to work in. The average is, say, 60. It ranges, to be perfectly honest, I don't even think that's totally accurate. It's those who have reported, remember that. Our placement rate is 93%, which is very high, actually. It's a fantastic number. This is four months after graduation. A lot of our students do opt to go to grad school. Now, there are a lot of misconceptions. I like to spell the myths right away. A lot of you say, oh, I'd like to actually go, you know, to do an MBA after. Most of the time, doing a BCom degree, you shouldn't be doing an MBA after. You should actually do a more specialized program. Because an MBA is actually a Master's of Business Administration, which is a very general program. So you're already getting that with your BCom degree. That's the big selling point. Because of that core curriculum, you're actually doing a little bit of everything already. So doing an MBA could be interesting. They're kind of pricey for what you get, because you already have a BCom. It's best to specialize at that point. But that's what advisors are for. Again, we're here to help you along for that. And that's pretty much it. I know it's very brief. I know there's a lot of things to sell. Now, I'm going to say one last thing. I don't know how many of you have had the opportunity to actually visit McGill. I know it's been tough. And I've always told at all these presentations, I always encourage students and applicants and anybody, even if you've accepted your offer, come visit the school. Now, I know it's really tough now, and we have not had that opportunity. And I think the decision making is a lot harder. You have to go on your gut feeling. You have to go on, you know, advice from family, friends. But I have to forewarn you, do be careful looking for advice on Reddit, for example, just don't. Find people that are aligned with your goals in life, who actually have your level of discipline. Don't seek it from people that are not in alignment with your own values and your goals. So I think it's important to select a school that you think you'd be comfortable at. And I know that's sort of a very abstract feeling right now. But we're here to help you out also on that. And we want to make sure that it's a good fit for you.