Illustration by Katie Doyle

When an international student arrives in a new country, their expectations are high. They hope to expose themselves to a completely new environment and culture and to experience something that they’ve not experienced before.

Unfortunately, this year has turned out to be so radically different that no one was prepared for it.

Arriving in a new country is no easy feat. Thousands of dollars poured into one’s education followed by a slew of verification protocols and procedures await students. Everything from booking tickets for a flight to struggling to find accommodations can be excruciating. But all the struggle is supposed to feel worthwhile when one enters their college and expectations become reality. But what if the latter part never happens?

International students were not able to visit their respective campuses, meet their professors or sit and chat with their peers in 2020 and 2021. Many students have both started and completed their programs over the course of the pandemic and have graduated without ever leaving their home country. With fees almost three times the amount a domestic student must pay, an international student secures their seat in one of the most prestigious colleges and is then expected to sit behind a screen and enjoy “online-learning”. The frustrations and complaints of international students looms over the excitement that was felt initially.

Travelling in a pandemic, along with being risky, is full of its own trials and tribulations. With no direct flights operating until the end of September from countries like India, most international students who enrolled in the fall-intake had to travel through connection flights. Many were travelling continuously for as much as 65-72 hours, voyaging from one country to another, for a route which wouldn’t normally take more than 20 hours.

For some students who came to Canada in the initial months of this year, a 10-14-day quarantine was mandatory.

“The hotel was around $1,000, and the rest of my quarantine was somewhere around $800. So, roughly it cost me around $2000,” said Aman Kothari, a marketing management and financial services student, who flew to Canada earlier this year.

The question arises, have all the monetary, physical as well as mental costs incurred by the students been worthwhile?

Despite constant efforts by the college to make the best of the situation, the discrepancies international students must settle with cannot be ignored.

“I am stuck with my laptop all day, and there has been less focus on the practicality of the course,” said a first-year from the School of Fashion.

With hopes of many programs returning to campus in the new year, there are still plenty that will be online or hybrid, and students might not get the chance to experience how vibrant the GBC life is. In these cases, international students have much to lose, as many of them will never get to experience the life they left their home country for.