For the first semester of my second year I was lucky enough to be accepted into the Universitas 21 scheme to study at the University of British Columbia in Canada. Looking back, I can’t imagine a better place to study than Vancouver: it is compact yet has everything you’d expect from a major North American city, and the UBC campus is only a short bus ride from downtown. The campus is a sight to behold; set in parkland on a peninsula jutting into the Pacific, just walking between classes gives you mountain and sea views, and at around three times the size of University Park, it’s also a town unto itself, with restaurants, bars, shops, museums and gardens….not to mention beaches! Vancouver’s location provided an endless list of things to do on weekends; I don’t think any exchange student left without spending an afternoon in the city’s beautiful Stanley Park, watching a Canucks ice hockey game or visiting Whistler, the world famous ski-resort just an hour’s drive north. The challenge was to remember I wasn’t there for a four-month holiday!
As an ‘international student’ — not an identity I was used to — I attended a three-day induction programme with the thousand-odd other exchange or transfer students, at the start of term. This meant it was incredibly easy to meet friendly people from all over the world, many of whom I’m still in contact with, and that’s on top of the range of people you can meet in lectures and tutorials. As a friend put it, I essentially now have a network of sofas across the world at my disposal in any future travelling!
Perhaps some people are put off studying abroad by the perceived risk of struggling academically due to differences in course content abroad, but I actually found that UBC’s modules weren’t dissimilar to what was on offer back at Nottingham, clearly an advantage of studying such an international discipline as economics. I’d been warned of a heavier workload but, although friends studying different subjects did experience this, workload and difficulty within the economics department seemed to be similar to Nottingham’s. The main differences seemed to lie in perspectives, teaching style and, often, the empirical examples that professors used, but rather than making things difficult, it just made for a more interesting and horizon-expanding way to study for a while.
I had an amazing experience at UBC. Having never been to Canada before, I had no idea what to expect, but it ended up being one of the most rewarding experiences of my life so far and I think every student owes it to themselves to study abroad at one point in their degree. I would recommend UBC — and really, any other study abroad opportunity, like at Nottingham’s campus in Malaysia — to anyone.
Written for the Nottingham School of Economics’ Newsletter 2010 [PDF].
Due to both the short word limit I was given and the piece’s intended audience, this does gloss over some issues and have the air of ‘toeing the party line’. That said I stand by everything I said here about how great the overall experience was and how I’d recommend it to almost anyone.