Replying to School "Name-Branding"

Hey NS. I've come to NSG today with a question for all of you students (old and new) who have probably spent this spring/summer trying to figure out what you wanted to do for school, and where you were heading in terms of a Career.

I am going in to my second year of university in BC. I decided not to acccept my offer at UBC last summer simply because I would rather not live in the city I've already spent my entire life in. I've never regretted my decision.

However, the one thing that really disappoints me about the school system of Canada is that so much importance is placed upon name recognition of your school. Some of my friends opted to go out east to Queen's or McGill simply because they got accepted in to the arts or music faculty when in truth they wanted to be engineers or business people. (Living arrangements asside).

I suppose there is some merrit to their ideas that they may get a better education from one university to the next, and this is definitely true to a certain degree. In Canada, the vast majority of schools are public. This means that you're getting roughly the same education regardless of where you go with a slight difference in specialized programs such as engineering or graduate studies such as Law or Medicine. I also realize that this is probably much different in the states since there are so many schools (private and public) that they have to be ranked.

I have always been one to say that if you're getting a high GPA and pretty involved with your schooling then you really have no limits to where you can go regardless of where you came from. Your undergraduate degree is pretty insignificant in the larger scheme of things, and yes it matters more where you get your Graduate studies done but what's the point of stressing out about this kind of thing way before you have the chance to continue with Grad studies.


I've been thinking about this lately because my cousin is a year younger than me, and after having a talk with him about his choices for school I realized that he was stressing the name of his school more than what he actually wanted to do with his degree.

Do you guys have any thoughts on this? Any concerns yourself?