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| Aerial View of the ubc Vancouver Campus |
49°16′N 123°15′W The Vancouver campus is located at Point Grey, a twenty-minute drive from downtown Vancouver. It is near several beaches and has views of the North Shore mountains. The 7.63 km² Pacific Spirit Regional Park serves as a green-belt between the campus and the city. Buildings on the Vancouver campus currently occupy 1,091,997 m² gross, located on 1.7 km² of maintained land. The Vancouver campus' street plan is mostly in a grid of malls (for driving and pedestrian-only). Lower Mall and West Mall are in the southwestern part of the peninsula, with Main, East, and Wesbrook Malls northeast of them. Wireless Internet access is available at no charge to students, faculty, and staff inside and outside of most buildings at both campuses.
The University Endowment Lands are not within Vancouver's city limits, and as such UBC is policed by the RCMP rather than the Vancouver Police Department. However, the Vancouver Fire Department does provide service to UBC under a contract. Also, all postage sent to any building on campus includes Vancouver in the address. UBC Vancouver also has two satellite campuses within the City of Vancouver: a campus at Vancouver General Hospital for the medical sciences, and UBC Robson Square in downtown Vancouver for part-time credit and non-credit programmes. Moreover, UBC is also a partner in the consortium backing Great Northern Way Campus Ltd. UBC is affiliated with a group of adjacent theological colleges, which include the Vancouver School of Theology, Regent College, Carey Theological College and the Corpus Christi College.
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| UBC "Devil-losing bridge" and iris pond in Nitobe Memorial Garden |
The campus is also home to numerous gardens. The UBC Botanical Garden and Centre for Plant Research, the first UBC department, holds a collection of over 8000 different kinds of plants used for research, conservation and education. The original site of the UBC botanical garden was at the "Old Arboretum". Today all that remains of it are trees planted in 1916 by John Davidson. The old arboretum is now home to many buildings including the First Nations House of Learning. The Nitobe Memorial Garden, built to honour Japanese scholar Inazo Nitobe, the garden has been the subject of more than fifteen years' study by a UBC professor, who believes that its construction hides a number of impressive features, including references to Japanese philosophy and mythology, shadow bridges visible only at certain times of year, and positioning of a lantern that is filled with light at the exact date and time of Nitobe's death each year. The garden is behind the university's Asian Centre, which is built from steel girders from Japan's exhibit at Osaka Expo.
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| Chan Centre for the Performing Arts |
The campus also features the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts: a performing arts centre containing the Chan Shun Concert Hall, Telus Studio Theatre and the Royal Bank Cinema. It is often the location of convocation ceremonies as well as the filming location for the 4400 Center on the television show The 4400, as well as the Madacorp entrance set on Kyle XY. It has also been featured as the Cloud 9 Ballroom in the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica (Season 1, Episode 11: Colonial Day). It has also been used in Stargate Atlantis (Season 2, Episode 5: Condemned), as well as in the first season of Reaper.
University of British Columbia Okanagan
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| UBC's Okanagan campus |
49°56′N 119°24′W The Okanagan Campus, is located on the former North Kelowna Campus of Okanagan University College, adjacent to Kelowna International Airport on the north-east side of Kelowna, British Columbia. This campus offers undergraduate degrees in Arts, Science, Nursing, Education, Management and Engineering as well as graduate degrees in most of these disciplines. The Okanagan campus is experiencing a $450 million CDN rapid expansion with construction of several new residential, teaching and research buildings now underway.
In 2010, UBC Okanagan campus is planned to double in size from current 105 ha. to 208.6 ha.
University of British Columbia Library
The UBC Library, which comprises 5.8 million books and journals, 5.3 million microforms, over 833,000 maps, videos and other multimedia materials and over 46,700 subscriptions, is the second largest research library in Canada. The libraries lent out over 2.5 million print works in 2008/2009 with over 2.9 million visits to the library (measured by gate counters). The library has twenty-one branches and divisions at UBC and at other locations, including three branches at teaching hospitals (St. Paul's Hospital, Vancouver Hospital and Health Sciences Centre, BC Children's Hospital), one at UBC's Robson Square campus in downtown Vancouver, and one at the UBC's Okanagan Campus. Plans are also under way to establish a library at the Great Northern Way Campus on the Finning Lands.
The former Main Library has undergone construction and has been renamed the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre. The new library incorporates the centre heritage block of the old Main Library with two new expansion wings and features an automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS), the first of its kind in Canada.
Major General Victor Odlum CB, CMG, DSO, VD donated his personal library of 10,000 books, which has been housed in "the Rockwoods Centre Library" of the UBC library since 1963.
Student life
Student representation
UBC undergraduate students within the Vancouver campus are represented by the Alma Mater Society of the University of British Columbia, or AMS. The society's mandate is to improve the quality of educational, social, and personal lives of UBC students. The executive – composed of the President; Vice President, External Affairs; Vice President, Administration; Vice President, Finance; and Vice President, Academic and University Affairs – are responsible for lobbying the UBC administration on behalf of the student body, providing services, such as the AMS/GSS Health and Dental Plan, supporting and administering student clubs, and maintaining the Student Union Building (aka SUB) and the services it houses. Recently, the AMS has undertaken an initiative to construct a new Student Union Building (SUB) with a cost of $103 million, of which $80 million is paid by student fees, with 50% more space compared to the current SUB. Construction is slated to begin in 2012.
Graduate Students are represented by the Graduate Student Society (GSS) which operates as an independent entity. The GSS is governed by a council representing each graduate program and an executive elected by graduate students as a whole.
Student facilities
The Student Union Building on the left, and the War Memorial Gym on the right. The red trees are typical of autumn.
The heart of student activity at UBC Vancouver is the centrally located Student Union Building, which houses offices of many clubs, half a dozen restaurants and cafés, a pub ("The Gallery"), a nightclub ("The Pit"), the inexpensive 425-seat Norman Bouchard Memorial Theatre ("The Norm Theatre"), several shops and a post office. The majority of the outlets and shops in the SUB are run by the AMS, however the addition of major corporate outlets in recent years by UBC Food Services has generated some controversy. The SUB Art Gallery contains mostly students' work. Beside the SUB, there is a small mound called The Grassy Knoll, which was constructed from the contents of the open pool dug near the Aquatic Centre. The Grassy Knoll was slated to be removed for the planned construction of an underground bus loop. However, on October 28, 2009, UBC was advised by Translink that due to its current funding levels it would not be able to provide funds for the construction of the bus loop. As a result, the bus loop project has been cancelled by the administration, although the rest of the renovations of the University Boulevard Neighbourhood are still under consideration.
Other student facilities on campus include the Ladha Science Student Centre, which was funded through a donation from Abdul Ladha, a levy from all Science undergraduate students, the VP Students, and the Dean of Science, and the Meekison Arts Student Space, which is located in the Faculty of Art's Buchanan D building.
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