When it came to applying for medical school, University of Victoria graduate Tara Mathur could have ended up anywhere and was willing to make the trek.
After applying to schools internationally for approximately two and a half years, she was fortunate when she found out she got accepted by UBC, as it isn’t too far from Victoria where she currently calls home.
“Because med school in Canada is so competitive, beggars can’t really be choosers,” says Mathur. “I was kind of willing to for the most part to move to any city that offered me a position in their medical program.”
She plans on moving to Vancouver in the Fairview neighbourhood on Aug. 13 with her partner Jeremy Lacey. Mathur has been with Lacey for as long as she has been applying to medical school. They met while both of them were in school at UVic. Lacey had a few semesters until he finished his degree when he met Mathur, while she was in her final semester before graduating her program.
When they started dating, they pondered if they should stay together if Mathur got accepted into medical school due to having to potentially do a long distance relationship with Lacey while he finished his program.
“It’s a bit of a strain on your relationship to not know if your partner is going to be moving in a year or sticking around for a while,” says Mathur. “We had kind of gotten to this point for a while where I feel very grateful and blessed to have had Jeremy sort of say, ‘Well, wherever you go, I want to join you.”
Although Mathur is excited about getting accepted somewhere so close by, she and Lacey are not excited about the cost of living in Vancouver, even though for them living in the Greater Victoria area has been pricey.
“It was definitely shocking to see how expensive everything was, but we’ve kind of gotten used to that just because Victoria isn’t exactly cheap to rent in either,” says Lacey.
Mathur lives in a shared two-bedroom apartment, paying $1,250 for her half of the rent in Victoria and Jeremy lives in Saanich paying $1,000 a month to live in a house with three other housemates. The apartment they plan on moving into will be $2,600 a month and each of them will be paying $1,300 a month.
“For me, my rent is going up by $50 so it doesn’t seem too bad obviously, but at the end of the day it does seem crazy that, that is a one-bedroom apartment. It is like half the space compared to the apartment I live in, in Victoria,” says Mathur. “The moment I had kind of explored the Vancouver housing market, I realized that moving in with someone was definitely a big benefit and just being able to share rent of course is a big one, but even little things like groceries and not worrying about transiting between places and things like that in the long run will definitely pay off.”
A perk of moving in together for the couple is saving money on the cost of transportation.
“Honestly, the hardest part of our relationship right now is the amount of travelling I have to do between her house and mine,” Lacey said. “It’s about a 45-minute bus to where she is currently from my house. To do that trip frequently, every day, takes a lot of time out my day. I rather spend that time with her, or my friends or doing something I want to do rather then spending hours on public transit. To have to schedule your entire night around when the bus comes in an hour, that’s probably the biggest component of wanting to move in together.”
Even though Mathur and Lacey understand they will save by moving in together Mathur advises that “the housing market is tough right now, especially in Vancouver, and I know Victoria can be pretty bad at times and it might be getting worse, but I think it’s important to not move in with your partner solely for financial reasons.”
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