on or off campus?

[VLog]

Should intl studnets live on or off campus for the first year?is there some graduate experience that is being missed out on if we dont live on campus?

Ill be in Cambridge/Boston fall onwards and was wondering if anyone has insight

[spunky]

i guess it mostly depends on where the 'hub of the action' is for you. 

 

i lived on campus (here in UBC, Vancouver, Canada) and found the experience to be kinda 'meh'.

 

moved out to downtown in the middle of the city and life is awesome. 

 

so my take would be to do your homework in terms of where you'll find more interesting stuff to do/people to meet, etc. and try to live as close as you can do there.

[PsycD]

I totally agree with Spunky.

 

It also depends on the city. In a place where the college is the center of the universe (e.g. Small Town, Nowhere), then campus housing may be the best way to go. However, in a cool city with much to offer where it's normal for students to congregate in places off campus, like where you're going, you'd probably get a great experience living off-campus.

 

I've been to Boston/Cambridge, and if I were going to school there I would def live close to the Uni, but off-campus. I'm moving to Montreal in a couple of weeks, and I'm looking for places with other graduate students, off-campus in cool neighborhoods with lots of things to do, but within two miles of campus so I can walk to school.

[Crucial BBQ]

Should intl studnets live on or off campus for the first year?is there some graduate experience that is being missed out on if we dont live on campus?

Ill be in Cambridge/Boston fall onwards and was wondering if anyone has insight

I did my undergrad in Boston and lived off campus.  In fact, the majority of college students in Boston/Cambridge live off campus.  It might be a good idea for an international student to live on campus first in order to acclimate into the new surroundings but for what it is worth you will most definitely not miss out on any "experience" if you don't.  

 

There are 300K to 400K college students (depending on who's figures you look at) within the Boston metro.  As such, a very large portion of the city caters directly to college students and you will be surrounded by college students practically everywhere you go.  Practically everything happens off campus. 

[maelia8]

I went to a tiny liberal arts college for undergrad, and it was in a suburb of a large city (you had to take a 25-minute bus ride to get to the downtown, and a 15 minute bus ride just to get to a grocery store). Because most of the students initially didn't have cars and because it took so long to get to campus if you chose to live downtown/in a more hip non-university neighborhood, all of the action was on campus, and if you chose to live off-campus you were really missing out if you wanted to have anything to do with other college students. 

 

However, in the Fall I will be attending a large research university situated in the heart of the midsize city it inhabits, so living "off campus" still means you can be in the heart of the city and within 10 minutes' walk of the campus. so in this situation, I plan to live off campus for sure. It all depends on the environment/location of the university you're attending in relation to the city it's in.