Returning to Montreal, Smith entered McGill University in 1921. While an undergraduate there in 1924 he wrote for and co-edited the "McGill Daily Literary Supplement"; in 1925, as a graduate student, he and F. R. Scott founded the "McGill Fortnightly Review", which billed itself as "an independent journal of literature, the arts, and student affairs edited and published by a group of undergraduates at McGill University." The "Review" was "the first journal to publish modernist poetry and critical opinion in Canada."