Apparently, before you can leave the country, you have to sit down and count exactly what it costs to go and stay.
That’s the part nobody tells you about the Laurier-Sussex program. Not the six-year structure, not the two degrees, not the photos of the Sussex campus tucked into the rolling South Downs. The part nobody tells you about is July — aka the month when the abstract idea of “going” turns into a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet turns into you standing in your kitchen, phone in hand, trying not to cry.
I’m writing this from Canada, having just finished my second year at Wilfrid Laurier University. I was supposed to be a little more than a month away from starting my first year at the University of Sussex. I’m not anymore. The way the program works is that students spend years one and two at Laurier, then years three through five at Sussex, and finally year six back at Laurier. On paper, it is an elegant six-year bridge to two degrees. In practice, July was a series of numbers that never quite settled, and a few too many gaps I had to fill in myself.
First, there is the UK student visa itself. The application costs £558 (1,049.27 Cdn as per Oanda Currency Converter) whether you’re applying from outside or inside the UK. Then there’s the Immigration Health Surcharge, which isn’t optional and isn’t cheap. It costs about £776 (1,459.21 Cdn as per Oanda Currency Converter) per year, meaning a three-year stay adds up to roughly £2,328 (4,377.62 Cdn as per Oanda Currency Converter) in health surcharges alone, paid upfront before the visa is even granted.
And that’s before the part that actually made me sit down on the kitchen floor: the NCA exams. Getting an LLB from the UK doesn’t make you a Canadian lawyer, but it makes you eligible to ask the National Committee on Accreditation for permission to become one. The NCA application fee runs around $400 Cdn, and depending on your assessment, you’ll typically need to complete six to nine subjects, either as courses or exams — each one with its own fee, its own study season and its own small toll on a timeline I thought was already set.
I spent a lot of July trying to find someone who could walk me through the total real cost of years three through five, and mostly ended up building the picture myself, piece by piece, at 11 p.m. That’s not anyone’s fault exactly. It’s just a lot to piece together on your own when you’re twenty and trying to plan six years out.
I ran the other option too: staying at Laurier and going straight into a Canadian law school, skipping Sussex, the surcharge and the NCA entirely. It was cheaper on the page. It was also, if I’m honest, the version I used to tell myself was the consolation prize — the one where I never find out what I’m capable of outside a 10-kilometre radius of my hometown.
Some of my friends in the program made that choice this summer too. I don’t think less of them for it — the math is real, the exchange rate is real, and the loneliness of filling out immigration forms alone at your kitchen table is real.
In the end, the pressure I was feeling wasn’t just a fear of change. It was the honest weight of the numbers, and the sense that I didn’t have enough clarity to feel steady about them. There is a comfort in the known that does not show up on any spreadsheet. This time, that comfort won.
So I didn’t pay the visa fee. In September, I’ll be back at Laurier.
More from home soon,
XO Jahnavi
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