TRAVEL REPORT HEC MONTREAL SPRING 2016 287784
1. Preparing for the exchange This travel report covers my exchange at HEC Montreal during the spring semester 2016. Going on exchange to Montreal is relatively simple and easy. Compared to destinations that are roughly at equal distance, say Asia and the US, going on exchange to Montreal does not require as many arrangements to be made before the semester. Here is a look at the preparations I had to take before my semester at HEC Montreal. 1.1 Documents required There is neither visa nor any special study permit required if your studies last for one semester only that is, not more than six months. For exchange studies lasting one semester, you need to have at least the following documents with you at the Canadian border and/or at HEC Montreal at the start of the semester: - your passport - Official Letter of Admission from HEC Montreal; this should be sent to your home university where you can pick it up a few months before your departure - Electronic Travel Authorization (eta); this is a new requirement for visa-exempt foreign nationals who are entering or transiting through Canada by air. It costs 7 CAD to obtain this. This requirement is still at its inception, so check if you really need it at the time of your departure. - SF/Q4 form from Kela; This form is meant for students and temporary workers going to the Province of Quebec who want to obtain similar rights to medical treatment in Quebec as they are eligible in their country of origin. In other words, obtaining this form and presenting it upon arrival at HEC Montreal will allow you to be exempt from paying the compulsory health insurance fee which would cost otherwise roughly 250 euros and to be eligible for free for the Quebec Health Insurance Plan during your semester in Quebec. You can obtain the above-mentioned SF/Q4 by simply calling Kela and asking for it. However, make sure to request it well in advance, say at least two months before your departure, since it can last a long time to get it. 2
Also, you should have your first address in Montreal ready at the Canadian border control whether it is a hotel or your actual residence during the semester. 1.2 Traveling to Montreal At HEC Montreal, spring semesters start already at the beginning of January and last until the end of April. For me the last recommended day to arrive to Montreal was January 3 rd, and all the courses and exams were over by 30 th of April. The mandatory orientation day at the university was on January 3rd, and the classes began the next day. The orientation day is highly recommended since it covers basically all the practical aspects of how to get around at the university and how to register for courses, as an example. It might also be a good idea to arrive to Montreal at least a few days before the mandatory orientation. I booked my two-way flights from Kilroy around mid-october and they cost me about 850 euros. If you want to stay flexible and not to commit to a fixed return day, you might want to consider tickets the return date of which can be changed later. From Kilroy students don t have to pay anything extra for these flexible tickets, but bear in mind that if need be and you want to change the date of your return ticket it can usually cost up to a few hundred euros to actually change it. No matter where you obtain your tickets, however, I highly recommend getting these flexible tickets since the end of the semester is a long way ahead and your plans are likely to change. 1.3 Accommodation in Montreal It is not completely necessary to have an apartment before leaving for Montreal. In fact, help was offered by the representatives of the school during the first week to those who didn t already have a place to stay. Personally, however, the vast majority of the exchange students had already got an apartment, and so had I. There are a few options for acquiring your apartment. First, the school recently started to offer on-campus apartments for exchange students. As far as I know, these fully-furnished apartments are very limited in availability and their price 3
can be pretty high, around 1,000 CAD per bedroom per month. They are of course conveniently situated very close to school. A second option is to consider private firms that partner with the university and who offer their apartments exclusively to incoming exchange students of HEC Montreal. This is the option I took and would highly recommend it, since it feels a little safer to rent an apartment from a company that is regularly used by other exchange students. The company that I got the apartment from is called GetYourPlace and is among the most popular choices for exchange students, but there are other options as well that are partly affiliated with the school, and you can check them out from the website of HEC Montreal. I will quickly review my experience with GetYourPlace a bit later. A third option is to search apartments on your own by looking at apartments for rent offered to the general public. Searching on your own may take a lot more time and effort, but you may also manage to get your apartment a little cheaper. Again, see HEC Montreal webpage for some examples. You can also ask look for apartments on Facebook or ask other students that go on exchange before you. Regarding my experience with GetYourPlace and by hearing from other students, the good thing with them is that renting an apartment from them is pretty easy. The apartments they are offering for the following semester become available to rent for about two months before the start of the semester, and for me that was late October. Since many exchange students use this service there is also little risk involved in actually getting what you are paying for. Due to the popularity of the service and the fact that the number of apartments they have is limited, all their best apartments usually sell out within five minutes after becoming available, so make sure not to miss it. GetYourPlace also requires a deposit of a one month s rent to be paid upon making a rental agreement. All the paperwork is made conveniently online. I managed to get an approximately 15 m 2 bedroom from GetYourPlace for 655 CAD in an apartment that I shared with three other exchange students all going to the same university. The rent included a private bedroom, whereas the kitchen and the bathroom were shared with the others. The price I paid included heating, electricity, water, home insurance, and a sometimes terribly working wifi. Some might say that the price is a bit high for an apartment like this and that you might get something less expensive by paying more effort in 4
finding something yourself, but I would definitely recommend this service due to how convenient it was to get an apartment from them. It is also nice that your flat mates attend the same university as you. Generally speaking when looking for apartments make sure to check the length of the period that you are renting the apartment for. For example GetYourPlace offers certain apartments for four months and others for five months, so that narrows down the apartments available depending on how long you plan to stay in Montreal. 2. Exchange studies In this chapter I will describe the process of choosing your courses at HEC Montreal as well as provide you with my comments on the courses I took. For bachelor s studies you need a total of five courses and for your master s you need four courses. At least for Master s courses there is a very narrow selection of courses available. For exchange students HEC Montreal offers courses in both English and French, and the majority of these are in French. So, at least if your doing your master s and don t understand French enough to follow a business course, there is only about ten courses to choose from. What makes the selection even more scarce is that you have probably already done one or two of those courses at your host university and cannot choose them again. You don t have to follow any specific program so you can basically choose whatever courses you are interested in. However, you can only include one language course among your selection of business courses. The official course registration was supposed to start at a given date about two months before the start of the semester, and the courses were meant to be allocated on a first-come, first served basis. However, since there were only a limited number of courses that were meant for exchange students and in order to guarantee everyone a more preferred set of courses, the school announced that they wanted to deviate from this and that the students were meant to send the school the courses they would be willing to take and in which order they prefer courses to one another. In other words, you submit the school the courses you would be willing to accept in your order of preference, and without asking 5
you again they automatically sign you up for the courses based on your preferences and on which courses have room left. Although students are meant to choose courses only at their own level of studies, master s students were required to accept bachelor s courses also because there were not many spots for exchange students on master s courses. The result of this can be seen in that bachelor s courses are full of exchange students, whereas there are not many exchange students on master s courses. For the spring semester, all the courses start early January and last until mid- April when the exam period of two weeks starts. There is typically one threehour lecture per week per class. Generally speaking, the teaching methods on all the courses rely heavily on class discussions, and active participation contributes to your final grade. Also, there are definitely more open-book exams compared to Finland. Here are the courses I took: 653014A Purchasing Strategy (graduate) Professor Claudia Rebolledo This course dealt with how purchasing has become a more strategic function in corporate activities. The topics of the course were e.g. how to manage a purchasing function, whether the company should make or buy certain inputs to its production process, and how to attract and retain the best suppliers. The course consisted of weekly lectures in which active participation (15% of final grade) was encouraged. In addition to this a paper was to be presented in class with a pair (20%). There were also three short cases (30% in total) to be written and submitted during the course as well as a final open-book exam (35%) in which computers were also allowed. Having not really studied supply chain management before I was a little concerned whether I it was a good idea to take this course, but I couldn t change it since the course was basically given to me. All the other students on this class were full-time students at HEC Montreal and had already knowledge of SCM and purchasing. However, it turned out that the substance of the course was not that difficult and it was rather easy to keep up with the course from early on. 6
201407A International Trade (undergraduate) Professor James O Farrell This course aimed at answering questions like when, why and how to export or import products. A big part of the course was about logistics and customs procedures regarding importation and exportation. The contents of the course were perhaps slightly targeted at learning these issues in the context of small and medium-sized businesses. This was the only bachelor s level course I took, and the evaluation consisted of a written term report that was done in group and that was about 20 pages in length (30% of final grade). Also a short 10-minute group presentation was to be held on a news article (10%). Participation (10%) was encouraged but not highly necessary due to a huge class size. Final exam (50%) formed an important part of the final grade and was a relatively easy one testing merely your ability to remember key facts from the lectures and the slides. As a bachelor s course compared to master s courses this was by far the easiest one. Nonetheless, the course managed to be a rather interesting one because it basically covered many practical aspects of how to import and export products. A big part of what made this course interesting was also the teacher who had a lot of experience in the matter and was able to provide quite fascinating reallife examples. 600606A Landscape and Challenges of International Business (graduate) Professor Pouya Ebrahimi The main topic of the course was globalization and how it affects countries and firms in the global context. Quite a lot of time was spent on institutions, such as the WTO and the IMF, and the role they have in economic policy as well as in the international business environment. Also emerging markets and the future of the current economic landscape were discussed. This was the other master s course I took and it was heavily based on class discussions (participation formed 20% of the final grade). During the course a written critical synthesis and a presentation in class was to be made on a couple of articles (20%), a short book review on the course book (10%), as well as a larger 20-page article as a group project (25%). The essay questions in the 7
open-book final exam (25%) were really open-ended and challenged you to apply knowledge from beyond the contents of the course. As for the other master s course I took the class size was small, only about 15 students. Again, class discussions were heavily encouraged, and there were some sort of student presentations held on every week s lecture. The lecturer seemed interested in the subject and commented a lot on the discussions in the class. 3614313 Français des affaires 3 Teachers Julie Duchesne / David Prince This course dealt with how to find work in Quebec and how to talk about and present firms that were from Quebec. This meant writing CVs and cover letters, as well as making presentations of firms. This was a typical language course focused on the business context. The evaluation consisted of two written assignments (25% of the final grade) and two oral presentations (25%), as well as of a mid-term exam (20%) and of a final exam (25%). Participation (5%) was also graded. I decided to take this French course that was offered to exchange students because I wanted to improve my French as well as to have one not businessoriented course to make the workload a bit smaller. The right level for this course was determined using an online test that was made a few months before the start of the semester. The details and instructions for this test were send among other instructions sent by the school well before the deadline of the test. 3. Montreal and HEC Montreal as exchange destinations Montreal is a distinctively North American city with about 1.6 million habitants. Despite its location and especially its proximity to the US border, however, Montreal also feels very European, which is probably not least due to the fact the only official language of the Province of Quebec, where the city of Montreal is located, is French. However, English is widely spoken and understood in Montreal, although people may not speak English that well in the outskirts or in the neighboring regions of the city. 8
If your interested in traveling in North America, Montreal is not a bad destination in that case. As said, Montreal is very close to the US border, which makes it relatively cheap (around 100 euros) to book a two-way bus trip to e.g. New York or Boston. Montreal is also conveniently located to other cities in Canada such as Toronto (ca 500 km) and Ottawa (ca 200 km). Quebec City, the capital of the Province of Quebec, is also worth visiting (less than 300 km away). As for the school itself, HEC Montreal is one of the four universities in Montreal and it can be highly recommended as an exchange destination. There are no school fees for incoming exchange students; however, students have to pay themselves for course books, of course. Getting a copy of a book is always recommended but not compulsory at all. At HEC Montreal the first week of the semester is full of activities for incoming exchange students. These activities are organized by the school s student committee called HEChange, and a few months before the semester they will be in touch to offer you a welcome week package that includes access to all the activities of the week for about 260 CAD. A few examples of these activities are parties, ice skating, sightseeing, a cottage night, and a spa day. I can recommend getting this package so that you can meet the majority of the exchange students already during the first week. 4. Final comments Montreal is a great destination to go on exchange and there is nothing wrong with HEC Montreal either. My only advice regarding choosing the university is to check out in advance what courses are available in case you are picky and what to be able to make sure that you get the right courses. For me this wasn t the case, and so I am very happy overall with me choosing HEC Montreal. If your interested in improving your French, Montreal is a good place to go to because the majority of the people speak French there. The vocabulary and especially the accent in Quebec can seem a bit weird at first, but once you get the hang of it it s a nice add to your repertoire. What is more, the school offers business courses both in English and French, which you can take both if you consider your language skills to be at a sufficient level. 9
One thing that made me choose Montreal as an exchange destination was to get to know the culture in North America. Coming from Europe, Montreal does seem indeed very North American. However, given that the city has got much influence from Europe means that Montreal might not feel that different after all as compared to European cities. In fact, I would say that the local people and the way of life they lead seemed surprisingly similar to those of ours. This is of course good news if you don t want to experience that big of a culture shock, but not so great news if you are looking for to spend your exchange semester in a completely different culture. If your considering whether to go on exchange at all, I d definitely say go. There are so many things you ll learn and discover by living abroad in a different culture with so many new people. Your time abroad will definitely be worth it no matter what destination you end up choosing, but if you can choose a destination that interests you a lot you re probably going to spend the best semester of your life. Bon voyage! 10