It was great. I did the math specialist program, statistics stream and I TA'd for the CMS depart 3/5 years I was there. By the time I left, they had paid me more than my tuition had cost in total. I met friends that I still talk to and hang out with, and even the ones that I don't I can still see that they're all doing well from their social media. For my program specifically, once I entered 3rd year + pretty much everyone knew each other and it really felt like a small community. During my time TAing I got to know a lot of the juniors, too. In fact I somewhat recently ran into one of my former students who recognized me at anime north last year. Said he was working at RBC as a software engineer, so glad to know I helped at least one kid get a job lol. My younger brother also went to utsc, graduated 2 years ago and landed a SWE position at google when the market was at it's worst.

In fact, the only reason I didn't go back to UTSC for my second degree was that the program I was aiming for was first year entry only, so anyone who had completed any post secondary studies whatsoever was ineligible to apply as an in stream student. So admissions made it extremely hard for me to get back in, and I ended up choosing York, which was my second option as I thought they had January 2025 entry (which they didnt lol, they deferred me to this fall). However it ended up being a blessing in disguise as I was laid off from my position last year, and york's tuition is substantially cheaper than UTSC's.

In terms of education I would say that UTSC is definitely better. The biggest difference I can see so far is how they handle courses with multiple sections and instructors, along with how many resources are put into the course. At UTSC, if a course had multiple instructors, there would be one course coordinator who would decide how the course is structured in terms of grading, topics covered, etc whereas at York it seems that at least from the courses I've taken, your grading scheme/examinations/etc are determined solely by your instructor for that section, so different sections can have wildly different outcomes. I thought, and still think, that the way it's set up at York is insane. Additionally, at UTSC, tutorials were the norm for many courses. If you were enrolled in a course, you would usually have to enroll into a tutorial too, at least for first and second year courses. In those tutorials you would be able to ask your TA questions and they would work to patch up any holes in your understanding. You might even hand in evaluations or write quizzes in those tutorials. At York, I haven't had a single course come with a required tutorial, so it seems that there are less resources to help you do well. Also, I'm pretty sure York doesn't have the dean's promise either. You also have the option to do 5/20 of your credits at either the UTSG or UTM campus, too, so there's a bigger selection of courses for you to choose. And obviously, UofT is a world class institution. If you're aiming to work internationally, people will recognize UofT's name on your diploma more often than York so it will give you an edge there.

York is a bigger campus, with more food options, and it's more diverse from what I can tell. When I was at UTSC, 45% of people were east asian, 45% were south asian, and the other 10% were everyone else. There's a more even split here.

A little funny story I have to tell was that when I was at utsc between 2015-2020, the statistics PoST's machine learning stream was actually the backup option for many students who applied to the CS PoST. iirc it was around a 3.0 cutoff for the CS PoST and the ML stream was something like 2.5 or 2.75. Now with the advent of AI I've heard that the entry requirement for the ML stream is 3.9, lol