University of British Columbia

Only 30 minutes from the heart of downtown Vancouver in Canada, UBC holds a worldwide reputation for excellence in advanced research and learning. The UBC campus should be on any Vancouver tour guide's itinerary - to show visitors where snow-capped mountains meet oceans in a breathtaking landscape. Founded in 1908, by 2003, the university had 33,566 undergraduate students and 7,379 graduate students. Famous alumni who have lived by the UBC motto 'It's up to you' include biologist David Suzuki, playwright Steven Galloway and Canadian artist Ken Lum.

Its impressive research library houses almost five million books and journals and over 800,000 maps. For those wanting to read the books within view of those snow-capped mountains, there is the Nitobe memorial garden, built to honour a Japanese scholar and rumored to have a lantern that is positioned so that it is filled with light at the exact date and time of the scholar's death each year.