By Amanda Gates (GDES ’19)
[Throughout the Spring ’18 semester, Social Media Ambassador Amanda has explored Montreal and its many hidden corners. Here she gives her best reasons as to why students should consider coming up here with the Champlain Abroad program]
1. New way of living
College dorms can be boring. Picture this instead: hotel-style rooms, kitchens, and freedom. Continue reading
By Lenny Gingello (GDES ’19)
Last Thursday SCI-155 Global Environmental Earth Science visited tropical rainforests, a forest full of butterflies, a hacienda, and many other ecosystems. How did we do this while in Montreal? Well, we went to the Montreal Botanical Garden!
Our first stop when we got there was the Insectarium where we saw many cool (and terrifying) insects. Not only did they have many preserved specimens, but they had some live ones as well. Most notably, they have an open vine on the top floor where ants are freely roaming around. This is something that people normally aren’t able to see so seeing ants interact with each other and move about an open space was really cool. Next we moved into the greenhouses. This was a truly beautiful space. We entered in the middle and to either side the building had rooms filled with different kinds of plants from different environments. We walked through environments ranging from a tropical rain forest, a temperate forest, an Asian garden with bonsai trees, a hacienda in the desert, a room full of cacti and plants from arid regions, and even more impressively a room full of butterflies.
By Ryan Hipgrave (Assistant Director, Montreal Campus)
Ask any Montrealer, and they’ll tell you that the best time to be in this city is the summer. During those sunny months, the streets of North America’s largest French-speaking metropolis pulsate with the vibes of festivals, concerts, outdoor restaurants, and the millions of tourists flitting about our many antique cobblestone roads.
Given all that is exciting about Montreal in the summertime, it makes perfect sense that Champlain College would offer two different, immersive study abroad opportunities in the capital of French-Canadian identity. From May 25th to June 30th, 2018, students are invited to descend on Champlain’s Montreal Campus to participate in one of two exceptional for-credit programs! Through both the Summer Culture and Summer Filmmaking programs, students will engage with the city on meaningful levels as they focus their projects on the unfamiliar territory in which they find themselves. Continue reading
Calum Phillips (Game Programmer ’19) talks about his internship abroad in Montreal at indie studio, Hyroglyphik Games, which is located in GamePlay Space.
At some point during my sophomore year I decided to go and study abroad. I had always wanted to go and visit another place, and doing it for school is the perfect excuse to go. At some point while I was reading over documents about the process of going abroad I decided to take an internship. The process of organizing this proved to be slightly easy while at the same time tedious. It required filling out extra forms, talking with the career services at the school multiple times, creating a passable resume, having a correspondence with the Canadian Government that involved sending them my passport information four separate times, and adding a thin layer of stress to everything I was doing. Now, skip forward about five months and here I am in Montreal in a internship with a small gaming company. Continue reading
By Josh Walker (GART ’19)
Let me just open this blog post in a very honest way – I am a huge baby when it comes to insects. They are really small but absolutely horrifying, they have skeletons on the outside of their bodies, and some have more legs than I have fingers which is the most horrifying thing in the world. Whenever I see a bug or have an unfortunate interaction with one, I’m paranoid for the next five minutes about what may be crawling on me that I’m unaware of. When I volunteered for this blog post, I figured I could give myself a reason to enjoy what otherwise would be a very neutral experience for me, but what I found is that I didn’t really need an excuse, the experience was quite interesting.
After our SCI 155 class departed from the metro station and arrived at the Insectarium, which was a much smaller building than I expected. I remember thinking that there wouldn’t be many bugs on display because of lack of space, but then I promptly remembered how small bugs are. Once we were inside, I saw the corny graphics on the wall of their stick bug mascot, there to inform us about the wonders of insectoid life. There was a large dome-like room with stairs descending down to the displays. The factoids on the wall were interesting with some good nuggets of information about what certain bugs eat, how they defend themselves, adaptations they may develop depending on their environment, but I’m a visual learner. The wall graphics weren’t nearly as interesting as the legions of mostly dead insects in glass cases, all staring at me with their wicked eyes and antennae.
By Nicholas Oprisu (GPRO ’19)
Environmental change is a “big” issue, in the sense that it’s something too expansive for me as an individual to influence or change. It’s important, yes, but how is a single person supposed to influence this issue? Do the efforts of little each person really count?
With that in mind, I went with my Environmental Science in Montreal (SCI 155) class to the Concordia Greenhouse, a collectively run and consensus-based nonprofit organization. Their main goal is to promote sustainable horticulture and education through workshops, open exhibits, and a welcoming atmosphere created by the horticulture. They allow other groups to use their space for the purpose of displaying or experimenting with new techniques of growing, adding to the educational diversity it has. The greenhouse itself holds dedicated growing rooms or communal spaces, where more plants can grow in a less controlled environment. The dedicated rooms either held projects by the greenhouse or those who rented it out and growing rooms for specific plants. They are a promoter of the idea of urban agriculture, which is the idea that the urban landscape can work with sustainable growing methods to maximize the usefulness and value of space in cities through rooftop gardens and other urban agricultural solutions, such as smaller-scale greenhouses.
By Elisabeth Hammond (PWRT ’19)
After an unexpected heatwave that rivaled Florida, the weather finally cooled off enough to enjoy fully the outdoors. Without the boiling heat, a Friday trip to the Botanical Garden’s annual Garden of Lights was actually something to look forward to. While I’ve been to the famous Garden many times, I had never been there when the light festival was held. Needless to say, already a fan of the Garden, the event was something I anticipated.
The breeze was cool and the metro bearable as the group made their way from the academic center to the Garden with a noticeable mass of others. Many people streamed from the sidewalks and joined together on the walk to the gardens, and excitement that many felt could be shared by everyone.
By Laura Smith (BUSA ’18)
When you are living within a city, such as Montreal, it can be overwhelming sometimes with all of the towering buildings and concrete. However, just a short walk from downtown is Mont Royal, the mountain that Montreal has built its base around. This park is filled with plenty of picnic spots, hiking trails, running trails, and other refreshing green spaces.
As the semester is coming to an end, the SCI 155 environmental science class here in Montreal decided to take a trip to Mont Royal for our final field trip. Throughout the semester, we have visited several museums and science exhibits, however, this is the first time that we were able to get hands on experience within the community. Our task for the day – clean up trash throughout the park.
By Halee Bernier (BUSA ’18)
As our fifth week in wintry Montreal came to an end, we escaped the cold during our Friday morning Environmental Earth science class and visited the Concordia Greenhouse. Just a short metro ride away, and located at Montreal’s second-largest English-language university, it is one of the only rooftop greenhouses in Montreal. The greenhouse creates a very warm and relaxing environment making it the perfect place for students to study and work on homework.
By Spencer Pearson (BRSM ’18)
As part of our weekly labs in the Earth Science class here in Montreal, there are a number of ‘excursions’ to various sites throughout the city that help students better understand some of the concepts taught in class. This past Friday, we spent our morning exploring the Redpath Museum and all of its little intricacies. The Redpath Museum is a natural history museum located the center of the McGill University campus, and has been around for a number of years, cementing itself as a Montreal institution.