Greetings from Montreal! (I’m seriously not kidding guys, I’m typing this blog post in Canada right now). Montreal is a beautiful city – it’s a mix of French and English influences with a pinch of international flavor. It’s also cold as balls up here. It’s 0°F during the day and in the negatives at night. The locals say that this is “mild” weather but anywhere with snow is not mild weather I say.

I’m here with 3 other business students and our faculty coach for the John Molson Undergraduate Case Competition at Concordia University. For those of you who don’t know what a case competition is, it’s basically consulting. You get a packet of information that gives background information and problems for you to address. You come up with solutions and present them in a PowerPoint to a panel of judges. 24 universities from around the world are competing. I’ve met people from Hong Kong, Thailand, Finland, Spain, and more!  (I spoke Canto with the HK team!)

We have three 3-hour cases (where you get 3 hours to come up with your solution and make your PowerPoint) and one 24 hour case (where you get 24 hours to come up with your solution and make your PowerPoint.) We had our first 3-hour case already; we lost by one point but it was to a school with a strong reputation in competing so I say we did fairly well for being an inexperienced team. We have our second 3-hour case today so we’ll try to make up for some lost points now that we know what we’re up against.

On Sunday, before opening ceremonies, my team and I decided to go up to Mont Royal to check out the view. It took us about 45 minutes to walk up the mountain from our hotel. We passed through McGill University and random statues on the way, so that was pretty cool.  I practically died on the trip – the snow from a few days ago had melted so the path was super slippery. Also, the only way to get up to the mountain was to climb stairs. Lots of stairs. It was worse than doing stadiums. Once you get up to the top, you get a panoramic view of the entire city. You can also ski, ice skate (on the frozen lake) or go tubing (basically sledding with a tube).

I have never been sledding, so we decided to ask some random person to borrow their sled so that I could experience the thrills of sledding. It was fun until I rammed into this random statue they had in the middle of nowhere. As I was trying to get up, I slipped on the ice and cut my chin. It looked bloody but it actually wasn’t that bad. You can’t even see the cut (it’s under my chin) and the wound is healing quite nicely (I think). But yeah, moral of the story is, beware of slipping on ice.

Anyways, I have to get down to breakfast and get ready for the next round of cases. Toodles! Stay tuned for my next post!