In my second year of university, I was faced with a small crisis. About half of my friend group had transferred, not to a different school, but to UBC Vancouver.
I was not alone: 67% of students voted “yes” on The Phoenix’s Instagram when asked whether they had a friend who transferred. The amount of first-years leaving our small-town campus for the big city is quite the phenomenon. Even though we are technically one university, the Vancouver campus gets a lot of the spotlight associated with the name “UBC,” and the Okanagan campus is … wait, where is the Oh-can-agan?
Few Canadian universities have campuses in two cities, each functioning individually. Practically speaking, we are two different schools. One could even say the two campuses are polar opposites in terms of their sizes and atmospheres. Hence, the Vancouver-Okanagan campus dynamic is an interesting and special one.
To investigate this dynamic, I asked students from both campuses about their experiences with transferring, and the question, “was UBC Okanagan not good enough for you?” The answer was — as it so often is — a complicated yes-and-no.
A popular allure of the Vancouver campus is its program offerings. While there are also programs unique to UBCO such as Cultural Studies, Management, and Sustainability, the Vancouver campus has even more, perhaps due to its abundant faculty and staff, resources, and location in one of Canada’s most developed cities.
Matthew Phan is currently doing a dual honours in Human Geography and English Language & Literature at the Vancouver campus. While he enjoyed his first year of university here at UBCO, he transferred to pursue this dual honours degree which our campus did not offer.
Transferring is not an overnight decision. Phan struggled to choose between more relevant research opportunities in Vancouver and maintaining still-fresh relationships in Kelowna:
“A lot of searching the Internet, talking with friends, professors, and family members, and a huge pros/cons table really helped identify some of the possible outcomes.”
Everyone’s pros and cons table will look different, but Phan’s ultimately pointed him towards Vancouver. Having spent two years there, he can now testify to the pros of the bigger campus: more building spaces, laboratories, clubs, food options, course offerings, and events.
Off campus, Vancouver as a city is arguably more convenient to go around and livelier than Kelowna. None of the buses here can top Vancouver’s Skytrain in terms of efficiency. Also, a big city equals bigger-scale community events like the Vancouver Writers Festival and the Vancouver Institute Lectures.
It is easy to see why one would like the Vancouver campus better: its scale and excitement surpasses UBCO. Indeed, we are a small campus in a slow-paced city, but those characteristics do not take away from the richness of university life here. It is ultimately a matter of preference: do you thrive in a bustling environment or do you learn better when less is happening around you?
It is also a matter of barriers and thresholds. First, to transfer campuses, you have to meet certain academic requirements. Second, pay attention to scholarship conditions too. The Phoenix’s Features writer, Soha Aftab, attends UBCO under the International Major Entrance Scholarship (IMES), which applies only to the campus she was first admitted to. Had she wanted to transfer, that would mean giving up her financial aid.
That said, Aftab has now found many perks of staying in Kelowna, such as its close-knit community. Just last weekend, she and I ran into each other on the bus and realised we were headed to the same cafe! Fun interactions like these are a staple of life at UBCO. “Community” and “intimate campus life” were some common answers on our Instagram story asking why people preferred UBCO.
A small campus fosters not only friendships but also academics. Here, it takes at most ten minutes to walk from one end of campus to the other, meaning you never have to worry about impossible distances between class buildings. This is something Phan misses about our campus, alongside the smaller class sizes and flexibility of office hours. Whereas “tightly scheduled 15-minute appointments are so common” at UBC Vancouver, here you have a higher chance of getting to know your professors, and delving into conversations with them that go deeper and beyond the 15-minute mark.
Finally, UBCO hosts lots of unique spaces and events like the FINA gallery, the AMP Lab and the annual Life Raft Debate. At these spaces and events, you experience a sense of intimacy that can only exist without a huge crowd to squeeze through and when you can recognise many familiar faces. Phan sums it up well:
“While there are more conversations swirling about at UBCV, it feels easier to speak and feel heard at UBCO.”
So each campus has their individual flair. At UBC Vancouver, maybe you can bask in the prestige of the name “UBC,” and not have to add an extra alphabet to specify which campus you belong to, yet the quality of education and university experience is just as worthwhile at UBC Okanagan. Despite the ones who got away, I am proud to be studying on this hidden gem of a campus, and I believe many others are too.
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