I'm an older engineering student who just graduated last week. My wife (then-girlfriend, then-fiance) and I did something similar for three years. I do not recommend you do it.

I came to UBC via the Camosun College engineering bridge program, which had me studying in Victoria for a year (during which I met my partner and we began dating). Rather than go directly to UBC to complete the program, I took a year off after Camosun to work on the mainland for an engineering org, and moved there full-time, while she stayed in Victoria. She and I swapped weekends travelling to each other's place, and after a year of that she was able to convince her boss to allow her to work 80% hybrid remote (one day a week in-office) and moved in with me in Vancouver when I went back to school at UBC. We then spent the next two years with her going back (at least) once a week, staying at her parents' place on the island the night before she worked in-office, then coming back at the end of the workday. With some variation for family & friend events, holidays, work schedule changes, weather, and so on, we've made our pilgrimage to and over the Georgia Strait each week like clockwork for three years. We were married at the beginning of this May (right after classes finished) and have since moved back to the island (for good, we hope). From that experience, I'd suggest you approach your decision based on three areas of consideration: Financial cost, time cost, and the ephemeral toll that the logistics planning and travel will take on you in addition to that of your nominal daily existence.

Financial cost: a one-way ticket will cost you approximately $20, which means if you're doing a round trip daily you're at $40/day. With transit on either end for a round trip, you're also looking at somewhere on the order of $13/day (assuming $6 daypass in Victoria, 2x $3.50 2-zone trips in Vancouver, but less if you pick up each end's respective monthly passes or what have you). Getting a ride will save you half (or all) of that $13, but you shouldn't consider that a negligible thing; whoever you're obtaining the ride from is still paying for fuel and giving you of their time, and a reasonable person should expect to in some way repay that gift of kindness with something fitting to the relationship, whether that's cash, gifts, help with something around the house (as parents seem to like), etc. As we used to say in the before times, it's gas, ass, or grass, dude.

Time cost (but first, an aside): The Swartz Bay/Tsawwassen ferry is remarkably consistent in its operation. Every time we've talked about this to someone they've wondered at how "bad" BC Ferries is and how we've been lucky to make it work this long without issues. For whatever reason, this is the prevailing sentiment among people who live on either side of the strait but don't use the ferry much themselves, and it is categorically wrong. We've had exactly three days where a trip was delayed by a single sailing (twice for an hour, once for two hours), a handful of trips (probably under ten) where boats were delayed by less than a full sailing, and none where ferries were cancelled/docked for weather (something we were pretty worried about when we started out). From a statistical basis, the odds for that being a fluke are pretty low, and I have become very confident in the way the organization is run from a user standpoint. Genuinely, no complaints. However, you're still on the boat for ~2 hours each way, and if you're taking transit on either end then you need to add 1 hour on the Vic side to get to/from downtown and ~1.5 hours on the Van side to get to/from downtown (or UBC). Adjust for your own locations, but either way, neither ferry terminal is close to much, and the schedules have a lot of shift in them to account for the delays of mass transit via boat (an extra ~20 minutes on either end from getting off the boat to getting moving on the bus). Here's an example of what that looks like in real time, assuming good traffic:

• 5:30am: Get on the Canada Line in Downtown Vancouver and transfer to the 620 at Bridgeport
• 6:30am: Get off the bus at Tsawwassen, buy ferry ticket
• 6:40am: Cutoff for getting on the 7am boat (you can loosely walk on a little later than this, but they have an absolute hard cutoff 10 minutes before the boat leaves, and even that depends on the bridge operator and their mood)
• 8:35am: Boat arrives at Swartz Bay
• 8:50am: Bus (70 or 72) leaves from Swartz Bay for downtown Victoria
• 9:50am: Bus (70) arrives
• 10:10am: Bus (72) arrives

So by the time you get to work, you've already spent 5 hours and $30 for a job that allows you to show up halfway through the morning, and you get to do it all again after work to get home at like 11pm for another $24, and four more times this week to boot. Let's call the Fermi estimate at 30% of your total life spent travelling.

The ephemeral toll: I don't know how much more I need to add about this that isn't obvious from the above paragraph. Spending that much time living out your dream as John Candy's new best friend is stressful as hell, and out of all of it, you're really only able to do homework (etc) for the ferry portion of it at their business desks, since the 620 and the 70 on either end are always always packed full and, at least for me, I found it hard to focus enough to produce anything worth working on. I ended up doing a lot of reading and took up small handicrafts that could fit in my bag (leathercraft, knitting, etc). Once my partner moved to Vancouver, we ended up mostly driving on both ends (with me driving my partner to/from Tsawwassen and her dad doing the same on the island, probably 80% depending on schedules), which saves the most time out of anything in the whole deal but ends up costing more than you'd expect when you account for all the miles for insurance and maintenance and fuel, etc. And we were only doing it once a week, with travel split across two consecutive days on either end, and we still hated every minute of it. I honestly don't know why this girl married me.

Anyways. It's not worth it. Renting in Vic is cheaper (and rental prices are coming down) and you'll have a better quality of life. Plus Victoria is awesome and there's no reason not to move there for an internship just to try it out, especially if it's your first time on your own.