Quote:
Originally Posted by Hali87
Basically my experience is that with urban campuses, the students tend to engage with the rest of the city (or at least the neighbourhoods near their campus) more.
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It's interesting to contrast the different setups. I've been a student at both Dalhousie and UBC. I was actually much more involved socially at UBC but I liked Dal's setting a lot more. It's great to be able to walk downtown, and even better if you can walk home as well. It's too bad that Vancouver didn't end up with a Dalhousie-like university somewhere near the centre of the city.
UBC's setting is much prettier and they have space for things like experimental farms and recreational areas that Dal does not. To me these were less desirable than being in town, but plenty of people would weight them more highly and like the relative peace and quiet. I eventually moved to Kits and biked to UBC, which was a pretty good compromise between commuting and getting to live in the city.
The transit situation is funny because, while Vancouver's system is light years ahead of Halifax's system, the universities here aren't actually well-served. Neither SFU nor UBC have rapid transit service; the SkyTrain is far away from UBC and the 145 from SFU is a terrible bus (right now it's running every 30 minutes, and it takes 15 minutes, so the shortest SkyTrain trip to SFU is actually pretty slow). The only thing that's significantly better about the university service here is that there's better night service. I think housing cost has a lot more impact on where students live in the two cities than transit. Taking the 99 out to East Van is really not much more pleasant than taking the 20 to Spryfield or whatever, there's just more of a payoff to doing it.
As far as being a college town, I always thought Halifax was pretty similar to Montreal. Lots of students, and many in central parts of the city, but lots of other stuff going on too. The universities don't loom quite as large in Halifax as, say, Queen's in Kingston.