Details

• Canada
• MASIMC-17
• Graduate
• WS 2025
• Time spent at the partner university: 4 months

1. Preparation

A few general, common-sense tips for preparing the exchange: Start looking for accommodation early. The earlier, the better, especially in the Vancouver housing market, where it's hard to find something if you only rent for a shorter period. Booking flights early is also important, as prices tend to go up the longer you wait. If you're going for the winter semester, think about your arrival time as it's worth arriving a bit earlier to Vancouver so you have time to travel around with summer weather. Visa and travel insurance also need to be prepared beforehand but fortunately neither requires much effort for Canada.

2. Accommodation

Unfortunately, as an MBA exchange student, you can't get into the student housing on campus. It's still worth trying since it's very affordable, but we were told that basically nobody gets in, and that turned out to be the case for us as well. If you look off-campus, UBC provides a list of the usual housing sites. Most of the options there are either expensive, in bad quality, or in a bad location, so finding something good takes effort. What worked for me was teaming up with other exchange students once the WhatsApp group was set up. We booked an Airbnb together in an area between the university and downtown, which turned out to be a nice location. Some people also tried Facebook groups, which worked for a few, but it's a wild card and takes a lot of effort. If you go off-campus, I'd recommend staying somewhere between the city and the university. The closer to the water, the better, but that also comes with a higher price. One tip: write to the MBA exchange program early and ask them to share a WhatsApp link you can pass around to the other exchange students. They're not allowed to create the group earlier themselves, but if they send out the link and people join, you can already start connecting and looking for accommodation together.

3. Academic life at host university

Academic life at UBC is really great. As an exchange student, you're part of the MBA program, which means that most of the regular students already have a lot of work experience and are a bit older. There's a lot to learn from them, and most of the other exchange students are in normal master's programs, similar to the ones at WU. The campus is a classic North American campus, so it feels like its own little city and literally has everything, including hundreds of clubs as well as a lot of sporting facilities and events. The MBA courses were generally on the same standard as WU's, and some were definitely better. You can tell that the MBA program has more money behind it, and some of the teachers are really passionate. My favorite course of my entire studies was Growing an Exiting Venture by Mike Gardner. Mike was a CEO for a long time and isn't a classic professor. His course basically covered everything from building, managing, and selling companies, which was a great summary of the whole studies in a lean way with cool examples and engaging lectures. Another cool course was New Product Development by Tim Silk, who is a very engaging teacher with a lot of experience in his field. I also took Two-Party Negotiations, which was just a weekend course but still a lot of fun since you're actively negotiating with your peers. The last one were the two courses that are part of the Creative Destruction Lab, which is very interesting if you are into entrepreneunership since you get to work with innovative deep-tech ventures that are actively looking for help on the business side. Overall, I had a good academic experience and learned a lot. Effort-wise, I would say it's comparable to WU.

5. Every day life in the host country

Public transport in Vancouver mainly works by bus. There's also the SkyTrain, but it doesn't go to UBC, so you can only really use it in the city. The buses are very much on time and you can see on Google Maps when they're coming, so public transport is generally really good. One thing that surprised me a bit is that it takes a fairly long time to get to the nicer mountains. From the university, it's usually around two hours. As it is in North American cities in general, you're always quicker by car, so Ubering or having friends with cars is very useful at times. The safety situation in Canada is generally pretty good, so I had no issues. For leisure activities, the university offers a lot of sports clubs and a great new gym. While it's still warmer, you can go into the ocean and do hikes, and in winter I even went skiing. There are also countless other events happening on campus throughout the semester.

6. Testimonial

My exchange in Vancouver was overall an amazing experience, mainly because of the unique setting. You have the ocean, a huge city, and the mountains all right next to each other, which lets you do a lot of cool things in one place. The mix of people and the Canadian way of life made it really special. I also used the location in North America to travel to places I otherwise wouldn't have easily reached, like Mexico, Hawaii, and the Rocky Mountains. Definitely use your time wisely and make the most of your experience ;)