It doesn’t take long at McGill to get a good sense of the university’s culture. As a highly-ranked anglophone institution, McGill attracts students from across the country and around the world. It’s fair to say that for many who move here to study, the school itself is the main selling point, not the city of Montreal. It appears that everything we need is right here on campus.
And maybe that’s a problem. Despite sitting at the heart of Canada’s second-largest city, McGill’s self-sufficiency isolates us from the broader Montreal community while fostering a culture of its own. With access to food, sports, leisure, healthcare, and social activities of every sort on campus, it’s easy to be disincentivized from exploring the rest of the city. We become entrapped by the idea of the McGill bubble, a subconscious limitation of our scope of the city to the McGill Ghetto and Milton Parc area. We’ve normalized taking the city and the province’s complex cultural fabric for granted, living at McGill but not truly in Montreal.
Justine, an exchange student from Sciences Po, became immediately aware of this social detachment between the campus and the city. She described how, if you live near McGill, you’ll naturally end up spending most of your time around campus. It’s not unreasonable to imagine a routine where you can grab coffee, go to class, have lunch, hit the gym, join sports clubs and activities, and even attend your medical appointments all within the comfort of McGill’s downtown campus. “It’s like a city within a city,” she says. Staying in this convenient microcosm makes an Opus feel like a luxury rather than a necessity, insulating downtown McGillians even more while limiting their gateway into all the city of Montreal has to offer. If you stop to think about it, the farthest many students have ventured in the last two weeks was likely a 15-minute walk to a club on Saint Laurent.
Thinking beyond convenience, International Development student Olivia suggests that the ‘bubble’ could also be a product of community building. She argues that “part of what makes the McGill bubble so profound is that a large part of McGill isn’t just from Quebec: the students from France stick with each other, just like the Torontonians and the Americans.” Olivia specifies that this is a cycle that begins when we first move into student residence. We form bonds with people who share similar backgrounds and create our friend groups in these limited spaces, rarely reaching out to students at Concordia, UQAM, and UDeM. After living in the McGill Ghetto for four years, Olivia is excited to “finally move from McGill to Montreal” after graduating. It will as she says, give her a chance to experience the city in a new light.
For those of us who won’t stay and fully experience this astounding city after finishing our studies, there are many other opportunities to exit the bubble. Keona Gingras, a 4th-year Linguistics student from Toronto, shared that bursting the bubble can be as easy as exploring the city’s bustling art scene. With countless concerts, plays, museums, and festivals throughout Montreal, there’s always an excuse to explore somewhere new. Bursting the bubble can also translate to hitting a pub in a new corner of the city to watch a hockey game, striking up a conversation with a local, joining sports groups in the park, or meeting someone new on a night out. If all of this sounds overwhelming for your social battery during midterm season, try these out when you have more breathing room in your schedule — stay for March break, explore for a bit of the summer, or dedicate a weekend to discovering a new neighbourhood.
McGill coddles us with unbound convenience, and in many ways, we’re privileged to have such an ecosystem at our disposal. But the real privilege should be being here at all: in a vibrant metropolis beyond our campus gates. At the end of the day, the ghost of the McGill bubble amounts to the choice of being accommodated. Burst the bubble. Choose differently. I dare you not to fall in love with the real Montreal.