When I was winnowing down my list of UK universities, I read the blogs of a lot of former UBC students. Many of these blogs were both rollicking good yarns and extremely informative sources of information.
Unfortunately, as far as I know, there is no Cardiff Uni blog yet. So in this post, I’m going to try to condense some of the things I would have liked to know when I was doing my research. If you’re a UBC student who, by some fluke, has stumbled upon my blog, I hope this helps. (Also, if you leave me a question in the comments section, it will turn up in my email inbox, so I’ll see and respond to it even if the blog is no longer active.)
I’ve borrowed a few of these questions from the supremely intelligent UBC Returning Students Survey. The rest are my own.
How difficult is it to obtain a travel visa for the UK?
Another UBC blogger write an article titled “Hell: The Story of a Girl and Her Visa Application,” which more or less sums up the experience.
I know I probably have every Go Global advisor at UBC rolling over in their graves with this advice, but I suggest not expending time and money to obtain a visa in advance—the process is incredibly convoluted and there are so many opportunities for it to go belly-up.
My advice is just to bring every document you can possibly think of and apply when you get to the border. Ultimately, it only took me about ten minutes with the help of a very friendly Scottish border agent.
How easy is it to find information when you arrive on campus?
Like any large university (UBC included), Cardiff Uni can be a bit of a bureauctopus. During orientation, try to get yourself adopted by a student leader. If they don’t know the answer of the top of their heads, they’ll at least know who to ask.
How about Cardiff housing?
Cardiff housing is the complete antithesis to Vancouver. Student housing is cheap and plentiful (although note that I didn’t say nice).
I lived at Aberdare Hall, an all-female dorm built in 1895. It had all the quirks, foibles and generally colorful character of an old building.
If you don’t get on-campus housing, there’s tons of off-campus apartments. The Student Union has an entire housing agency, completely FREE, to help you find a place. A friend of mine, also from UBC, decided she didn’t like her dorm, so she moved to a lovely one-bedroom apartment right in the heart of downtown Cardiff. She paid about the same rent I did.
How’s the food?
My residence had both communal kitchens and a dining plan. Either option has its ups and downs.
All the dorms do have communal kitchens. My main objection wasn’t the facilities, which were perfectly okay, but the tendency of my flatmates to make unilateral land claims on cabinets and fridge shelves, of which there weren’t quite enough to go around. From talking to other students, I don’t think this was an issue unique to my dorm—it might have been a campus culture thing.
My dorm, Aberdare Hall, was one of the only ones with a meal plan. The meal plan (“catering” in British parlance) was a very different arrangement from UBC dining halls like Totem Park. Meals were at a fixed time, so if you were in class during that time, tough luck. There was no lunch, and usually only one meat and one vegetarian option for dinner. The food was pretty hit-or-miss, erring possibly on the side of miss. On the other hand, groceries at the Lidl on campus were unbelievably, shockingly, gloriously dirt-cheap.
If you want a hot meal for cheap, Cardiff Market is about fifteen minutes’ walk from campus. It’s basically a permanent farmer’s market in a big warehouse. They have everything—meat pies, curries, soups, sandwiches, baked potatoes, fish and chips—for extremely reasonable prices.
What does class registration look like?
Cardiff University has many wonderful qualities. Ease of registration is not one of them.
My advice? Go through the course catalogue in advance. Pick a lot of possible classes, because:
- The catalogue doesn’t tell you what date or time they’re at, so you can’t work your schedule to avoid course conflicts or get a certain day off.
- Careful: some courses aren’t offered to international students, but it’s hard to find this out in advance. Ostensibly there’s a dedicated course brochure just for international students, but I couldn’t find it.
On registration day, they release a herd of two hundred international students into a large room with the heads of each department. It’s a four-hour-long free-for-all. You have to somehow find out which professors are which (they’re not wearing name tags), get to the front of the mob (applying elbows if necessary) and state your case for enrolling in their program. There was no consistent system of waitlists if courses were full. Things seemed to be done on a case-by-case basis.
Ultimately, through a combination of wheedling, elbowing, and in one memorable case, submitting my resume to a department head, I did manage to get about half the classes on my original list of first picks. The upshot? Just be prepared, and come with backup choices.
Any course recommendations for visiting UBC students?
I wouldn’t bother with the Welsh culture courses created specifically for exchange students—the professor was phenomenal, but the curriculum was very shallow. If you want to get to know Wales, read books about it, travel on the weekends, and talk to Welsh people!
Day trips from Cardiff?
Cardiff itself will only keep you occupied for a few days, so definitely take day trips. There are a bajillion of these. Some of my favorites:
- Caerphilly Castle: If you’re a castle nut, the best castle in the region is Caerphilly. It’s a huge, sprawling Norman castle built by the Marcher Lords, only 20 minutes from Cardiff by bus.
- St. Fagan’s Museum: An open-air museum in the suburbs. They literally flat-packed and reassembled historic buildings from all around Wales, ranging from a 14th-century grange to a 19th-century woolen mill. There’s a Tudor mansion, a medieval barn, a number of farmhouses, and some reconstructed Celtic roundhouses.
- Bristol: A short train ride from Cardiff. It’s a great city to explore on foot; there’s not quite as much of historical interest there, but it’s a lovely day trip nonetheless.
- Bath: Also very close to Cardiff; famous for its Georgian architecture and ancient Roman baths. If you’re too cheap to pay admission to the baths, walk around the corner from the entrance, climb the stairs and and hoist yourself up on the wall; you can see down into them for free. (I don’t think it’s illegal, but all the same, don’t get caught.)
- Caerlleon: A suburb of Newport, maybe an hour from Cardiff, with a medieval street plan, a Roman Legion Museum, a Roman amphitheater, and strong associations with Arthurian Legend.
Overnight trips?
If you have a three-day weekend (or a class you can get away with skipping), try some of these.
- Conwy: This is in North Wales, about five hours by train from Cardiff. Conwy Castle is a huge Norman castle on a river, surrounded by the best-preserved medieval town wall in Europe. In town there are lots of cafes, a nice river walk, a Tudor townhouse, a museum in a 14th-century merchant’s house, and most important, a cheap youth hostel just outside the walls. If you still haven’t got enough of the Normans, it’s a short train ride from Conwy to Caernarvon, which boasts the second-best medieval town wall as well as another spectacular castle.
- Hay-on-Wye: A little Welsh town famous for its secondhand bookstores. It’s not that easy to get to from Cardiff, but definitely worth the trip.
- Tintagel Castle: An unholy headache to get to from Cardiff without a car—think two trains, two buses and possibly a taxi—but Tintagel Castle, perched dramatically on a Cornish headland surrounded by steep cliffs, might be the most romantic castle on the planet.
Traveling on a Student Budget
YHA (Youth Hostel Association) has locations practically everywhere. They’re cheap, reliable, clean, friendly and usually really well located, as long as you don’t mind sharing a dormitory with eight people who snore. They’re rarely booked up, but do make your reservation online just in case.
Airbnb is also cheap, with the added benefit that you’re staying with knowledgeable locals. The catch is that there are many fewer locations; if you’re trying to get to someplace really obscure, like, say, a Neolithic monument that isn’t named Stonehenge, you may end up staying two towns over.
Ryanair Deals are an unbelievable invention, as long as you aren’t picky about destination or dates. I made an impulsive jailbreak to Malta between exams for £25 round trip. But the prices change on an almost daily basis—a friend who decided to come with me the next day had to cough up almost twice as much.
Trains are a lovely thing, but more expensive than you’d expect.
Megabus is a dirt-cheap intercity bus, but it has pretty limited routes and run times.
How’s the culture shock?
The peanut butter was a nightmare. They only have the healthy stuff.
Apart from that, the only cultural difference I stumbled over was the educational terminology. They don’t have classes, they have “modules.” They don’t have majors, they have “courses.” They don’t review, they “revise.” They don’t study a subject, they “read” it. And they don’t give the Americans/Canadians a glossary!
Best part of Welsh culture?
The Welsh are endearingly nationalistic. There are Welsh flags everywhere, and there are a lot of cultural festivals. Also, all the signage is bilingual (the joke goes that most Welshmen are fluent in street sign). I didn’t take a Welsh language class, but I still picked up a lot of random Welsh words.
How are international students treated by local people? By university staff and faculty? By students?
Everyone I met was incredibly kind and helpful (although many people spotted my American accent right away and wanted to talk politics).
I can’t think of a single negative interaction I had this semester. The Welsh aren’t always that fond of the English (for historically justifiable reasons), but they’re perfectly nice to everyone else.
Is Cardiff aesthetically pleasing?
Meh.
A lot of Cardiff was bombed flat during the Blitz. Much of of the city is newish. The best parts of Cardiff are the Victorian and Edwardian arcades.
I’d give Cardiff Castle maybe two stars out of five, though I’m a castle snob.
Here’s Castle Street, one of the prettier streets in the center of town:
Outside of downtown, it’s nothing but soulless brick suburbs for miles.
What are the ten most important things for a UBC student to know before going on exchange?
In no particular order:
- Cardiff itself is not a particularly photogenic city, nor a large one. Do travel. There are some gorgeous parts of Wales (especially in the north); they just take some effort to get to.
- Cheapest groceries are at Lidl near the Student Union Building. Cheapest bedding, lamps, kitchenware etc. for your dorm or apartment are at Wilko downtown. Best produce (and baked goods) are at Cardiff Market, which is housed in the Edwardian warehouse next to the cathedral.
- Make sure to pack adapters for your electronics chargers. You can order them online. They’re usually in the $3-5 range. You don’t want to get to Cardiff with a dead phone and have to dash around downtown looking for an adapter plug through a haze of jet lag so you can charge your phone so you can Google Map your way to campus. Trust me on this one.
- Once classes start, be prepared to have to actually track down physical books in a library. Maybe you’ve had to do this already anyway, but never having taken a research-heavy course in my life, I found the concept of actual physical books on an actual physical shelf kind of challenging, especially since the Cardiff University shelving system is absolutely Byzantine.
- There’s a lovely study lounge on the top floor of the Student Union Building. It’s not very well advertised. I only found it by accident. It has couches and it’s usually not that crowded.
- I don’t actually know anybody who’s managed to get their student visa in advance. It’s really not hard to apply at the border. Just look up what documents they want, and bring those. (Actually, despite the long list of required documentation online, all the agent at the border asked to see were my acceptance letter and the address of my dorm.)
- If you want to hike or go to famous landmarks like Stonehenge, definitely check out Give It A Go—it’s basically a field trip club. They do day trips and overnights. I never went on any, but everyone I spoke to loved them.
- If your dorm offers you a bedding set for 30 pounds, don’t trust it. Just go to Wilko. Their stuff is better quality, better variety, and probably better prices.
- If you’re a coffee snob like me, be warned: there’s not a whole lot of good coffee here. Then again, the UK might just turn you into a tea snob.
- If you do decide to brave British coffee, I highly recommend Barker Coffee in Castle Arcade as the best study spot in Cardiff. The coffee is pricey, but you can turn up as soon as they open, buy your coffee, and then sit in one of their overstuffed leather armchairs for the next eight hours working on your laptop and drinking your coffee molecule by molecule. It’s a great place to get work done.
What was the greatest challenge about life in Cardiff?
Finding anything in the library!
How does going on exchange change your perspective?
There’s no way to answer this without lapsing into cliché. I won’t go into the whole “living in a different culture has given me insight into the foibles of my own” speech, or the “world is bigger and more diverse than I realized” one, or the classic “I forged lifelong friendships” bit. I will say that fending for oneself in a time zone that does not permit one to call one’s parents to solve the problem when one is stranded on a train platform at midnight in the wrong county is definitely a trial-by-fire initiation into adulting.