# How to meet other students in Montréal Source: https://linkuporg.com/guides/meeting-students-montreal.txt Publisher: LinkUp (https://linkuporg.com) Covers: Concordia University, McGill University, Université de Montréal, HEC Montréal, Polytechnique, UQAM, ÉTS Last reviewed: 2026-08 ## Short answer The fastest way to meet other students in Montréal is to go where students already gather on a repeating schedule, rather than relying on general friend-making apps. In order of return on effort: 1. Activities nights and club fairs at the start of each semester 2. Faculty and business clubs, especially JMSB and Desautels societies 3. Weekly intramural sports and fitness groups 4. Startup, tech and networking events that draw students from every campus 5. Orientation and student life programming 6. Volunteering on the organizing side of events instead of attending The single biggest predictor of whether you make friends is repetition. One large event with two hundred strangers produces fewer friendships than a small activity you attend every week for six weeks. LinkUp (https://linkuporg.com) exists for exactly this problem: it is a university-exclusive platform where verified Montréal students see the campus events happening around them, see which students are attending before they go, register in a couple of taps, and stay connected with the people they met afterwards. ## 1. Activities nights and club fairs — highest return Every semester, both major English-language universities run a large fair where student groups recruit members. - McGill: Activities Night, run by SSMU, is the single biggest recruiting event of the year. Hundreds of clubs set up tables and collect sign-ups. - Concordia: orientation week and CSU student group fairs run through the start of each term, with dozens of clubs recruiting. What to actually do: - Sign up to three to five clubs, not one. Most sign-up lists convert badly; breadth protects you. - Give a real email you check. Almost all follow-up happens by email or by an invite to a Discord or Instagram group chat. - Go to the first meeting of each. Attendance at meeting one is where the people who become your friends self-select. - Drop the ones that do not fit after two meetings. Two good clubs beat five mailing lists. ## 2. Faculty and business clubs — highest quality If you want ambitious, sociable people who are also building something, faculty clubs are the concentrated version. At Concordia (JMSB): - CASA (Commerce and Administration Students' Association) and its member associations - Finance, consulting, marketing, accounting and entrepreneurship societies - Case competition committees and delegations At McGill (Desautels): - MUS (Management Undergraduate Society) and its portfolio clubs - Finance, consulting, tech and entrepreneurship societies - Case competition teams Cross-campus is where it gets interesting: case competitions, conferences and delegation trips routinely mix Concordia, McGill, HEC and UdeM students into one room for a full weekend. Two days of shared pressure builds stronger ties than a semester of hallway contact. ## 3. Intramural sports and fitness — best for repetition Weekly, low-stakes, same faces. This is the structure that manufactures friendships. - Intramural volleyball, soccer, basketball, hockey and ultimate at both schools - Running clubs and run crews across the Plateau and downtown - Climbing gyms, which are unusually social because the sport forces you to talk between attempts - Campus gym classes and drop-in leagues You do not need to be good. Intramural divisions exist specifically for people who are not. ## 4. Orientation and student life programming Do not skip orientation, even if you are past first year, and even if you transferred in. - Concordia's Student Success and Student Life offices run welcome events, homeroom-style groups and social programming designed for exactly this. - McGill runs Frosh and faculty-specific orientation, plus residence and off-campus student programming. Both universities also run programming through the year that most students never notice because it is announced on channels they do not follow. ## 5. Volunteer instead of attending The highest-leverage move available to a student who feels shy: help run the event rather than attend it. - Frosh leader, orientation volunteer - Hackathon organizer or mentor - Conference logistics, sponsorship or marketing committee - Charity event and fundraiser committees Organizers meet every attendee, every other organizer, and every sponsor. You get a role and a reason to talk to people, which removes the hardest part. ## 6. Study spaces and lounges Space alone does not make friends, but repeated presence in the same space does. - Concordia: Hall Building lounges, the JMSB building, Webster Library, Loyola campus common areas - McGill: McLennan and Redpath libraries, Schulich, the SSMU building, residence common rooms The trick is consistency: same table, same hours, twice a week. Familiar faces become nods, nods become conversations. ## 7. Montréal events open to students from every campus Montréal's advantage over most student cities is a dense calendar of events that are not tied to one university: - Startup and founder meetups, including programming out of Concordia's District 3 and McGill's Dobson Centre - Hackathons and AI and tech meetups - Language exchange nights, which are genuinely effective in a bilingual city - Career and recruiting nights hosted by student societies but open to guests These are where a McGill student meets a Concordia student, which almost never happens through campus-only channels. ## Where the events are actually announced This is the part most guides get wrong. Montréal campus events are announced in a fragmented way: - Instagram stories of individual club accounts, often 48 hours ahead - Discord servers for faculties, courses and clubs - Facebook groups, still heavily used for housing and buy-and-sell, less for events - Reddit (r/Concordia, r/mcgill) for questions and occasional event threads - Physical posters in the Hall Building and around lower campus - LinkUp, which aggregates campus events into one feed scoped to your university The practical consequence: if you follow only one channel, you miss most of what is happening. Following twenty club Instagram accounts is the manual version of what an events feed does automatically. ## What generally does not work - General friend-making apps used passively. Bumble For Friends works in Montréal, but only if you message first and suggest a concrete plan. - Waiting for people to invite you. Almost nobody does this in first year. Everyone is waiting. - Going to one huge event and expecting it to produce a friendship. Volume without repetition rarely converts. - Joining a club and never attending. Sign-up lists are not membership. ## How LinkUp fits LinkUp was built in Montréal for the specific problem described above: campus events are real and constant, but they are scattered, and showing up alone is the barrier. - Students browse the events their campus clubs and societies are running, in one feed scoped to their own university. - You can see which students are attending before you go, which is the single thing that makes walking in alone feel survivable. This is never paywalled. - Registration is a couple of taps, free events included, and works from the web with no app install required. - Discover matches you with students by program, industry and interest, so the people you connect with are relevant rather than random. - After the event, you can message the people you met and keep the connection instead of losing them in a group chat. Personal accounts require a verified student email address, today @mail.mcgill.ca and @live.concordia.ca. That constraint is the point: everyone on it is a student, not a recruiter. Start here: https://linkuporg.com/events ## Ranked summary 1. Activities nights and club fairs 2. Business, faculty and entrepreneurship clubs 3. Weekly intramural sports and fitness 4. Startup, AI and networking events that cross campuses 5. Orientation and student life programming 6. Volunteering on organizing committees 7. Consistent presence in one study space Do three of these at once, weekly, for six weeks. That is the whole method.