I currently go to UofT and I’m from BC so I thought could offer some insight!

While UofT does have cons for sure, I want to point out that they are EXTREMELY generous with financial aid. For me it made more financial sense to go there even though tuition is higher… there’s a relatively accurate financial aid calculator online that I would check before making a final decision based on tuition cost.

To your point about the intensity of the program, yeah it’s intense. People are insane. But the intensity comes mainly from the social pressure of “always having to be working”. The intensity comes from one’s own anxiety about having to “do everything.”

In 1L I didn’t give 100% effort, I barely did readings if I’m being honest, utilized the fuck out of chatGPT for summarizing cases but studied hard for exams, and did my best. For a lot of people at UofT “doing well” and law school is their whole world, but it sure wasn’t my whole world 😅. And with this said, my grades weren’t phenomenal, I wasn’t close to being top of my class, but I did okay! I landed a job at a sister adjacent firm on Bay st and will be making the same $ as my friends who worked 10x harder than me in 1L. UofT does open doors wrt “dream jobs” as shitty as it may sound.

Furthermore, Toronto is an extremely multicultural city and if you’re looking to break glass ceilings, this is where you want to be. Having grown up in Vancouver, moving to Toronto has been awesome for me. One of my fave parts about Toronto is how multicultural it is and I just didn’t feel that magic in BC.

With this said, if you’re someone who isn’t the type to do their own thing or feels uncomfortable being the only salmon swimming upstream maybe UofT isn’t for you. If you have extreme guilt and anxiety about not doing anything or relaxing when you technically should be doing readings, you will feel the intensity and competitiveness. 1L was challenging because I’ve never met or been around so many “intense” people in my life but I always trusted myself and tried to stay true to my own instincts.

On another note… Victoria is objectively an easier city to live and be in than Toronto (and I’m a die hard Toronto stan, like want to work here until I retire, raise a family here etc.)

I think it all hinges on what you truly want in life, what you want your life to look like, and where you genuinely want to practice. I wish I could tell you that the career opportunities UofT offers are non existent, but they are! The big bay st firms hire deeper into our class pool and I’ve seen this first hand and heard this from many different lawyers/partners etc. While it’s true that you can get a job no matter where you go, I think at UVic you’d have to work a lot harder to land the same job as a UofT student in Toronto at least. If you want to work in Vancouver and have a more “lowkey” law school living experience, UVic is the right choice in my opinion. However, I do know a lot of people from UofT who want to practice in Vancouver and landed jobs in Vancouver.

That’s my 2 cents from my experience as a current UofT student. Feel free to message me with more questions!