A student in Montreal has completed two degrees from two different schools this past year, finishing a course load that would have taken seven and a half years in just five.
Graduating from both mechanical engineering at McGill University and film animation at Concordia University, Adam Schachner said he is relieved to be through a heavy university education. The two schools are about a 15 minute walk from each other.
Schachner said one of the hardest parts of the double degree didn’t have to do with workload—planning and time management caused him as much stress as homework.
“Neither course fit with the other one because they were totally different programs,” he said. “Both programs had pretty strict prerequisites.”
This endeavour was not planned by Schachner. He recalled his first year of university, when he was just an engineering student.
“I really hated it,” Schachner said. “I wasn’t happy with my education at that point, and I kind of stumbled on the animation program.”
“I went to Concordia and they were showing some stuff the previous grads were doing,” he added. “And it was really cool—it piqued my interest.”
Schachner said many have asked if he was even allowed to complete two degrees at two different schools at the same time. He said there is nothing saying you can’t, but isn’t sure of the answer.
“I checked the rules,” he said, “and there’s nothing there. I guess they never thought anyone would do it so they never made a rule.”
Schachner told few people about what he was doing.
“I don’t think it was disallowed, but I think the schools would have gotten annoying about it,” he said. “I definitely had some worries.”
Concordia’s film animation had several compulsory courses, which Schachner said made up a large part of his schedule.
Heralded as one of the best film animation programs of its kind in Canada, Schachner said Concordia’s animation program was also time-consuming.
“You have to put the time in,” he said. “Hand-drawn animation is 24 frames a second, so you’d be making hundreds of thousands of drawings for just a few minutes of film.”
Schachner said the workload was still heavy in mechanical engineering, but it wasn’t as time-consuming as film animation.
He said he thinks the best part about the animation program was how it allowed him to take some kinds of thinking from his engineering degree and apply it to his animation degree.
“I liked being able to take ideas and make them a reality, and I thought I’d be able to do that with engineering but it ended up working with animation,” Schachner said.
This wasn’t his first attempt at two programs. When Schachner graduated CEGEP, Quebec’s college system, he couldn’t decide which engineering program to enroll in, so he decided on both as a trial run.
“I couldn’t decide between McGill and École Polytechnique de Montréal, so I just registered to both for the first two weeks to try them out,” he laughed.
Schachner ended up choosing McGill and adding film animation to his course load the next year.
“Usually you’re supposed to specialize in one thing,” he said. “But I didn’t want to do that.”
