It was a cold, freezing night in January. Deepak Sharma and Jassmeet Singh just landed at Halifax Stanfield International Airport in the end of a long journey from New Delhi. The flight was delayed for hours because of a snowstorm. The amount of snow they faced that night was the largest they had ever seen; they realized their picker had already left the airport.

“We had to pay $70 for a taxi to get to the Downtown,” says Singh. “$70 back there at home, means $3,500 in Indian Rupees.”

After two years, Sharma and Singh, both Dalhousie University students, still remember that devastating first night in Halifax. That’s why they recently started univfax, a website which provides incoming international students with the local accommodation/traffic/job information and a connection to international students who live in Halifax, so they can prepare for their life in Halifax in advance.

(Source: HALIFAX INDEX 2016 by Halifax Partnership )

Today, the city says it has 6,000 international students in universities from all over the world. This means that international students take up more than 1% of the city’s population. Since 2005, the number of international students in Halifax has doubled over ten years.

In Saint Mary’s University (SMU), more than one in four students are non-Canadians.  The revenue generated by international students is crucial to universities, as they pay differential fees, which often cost as equal to their annual tuition fees. For example, in 2012, the tuition fees paid by international students to SMU had already taken up to 41% of the total student fees in the same year.

However, Sharma says that many of them still have trouble finding adequate housing or struggle with buying groceries. Although each university has an international centre in place to help students, he and Singh say that the sharing of information within the international student community is invaluable.

Since 2009, the economic organization Halifax Partnership, which is run by the government, has launched the Connector Program – which has helped more than one hundred graduating international students, helping them to network with the local job market.

Timeline-What happened to the international students and universities in Halifax [2011-2016]

Denise DeLong, the project manager of the Connector Program, says the city would rather focus on supporting their settlement after the graduation, because keeping young talent in the city is another big challenge for the local economy.

“I’m sure there are challenges when they start their lives in Halifax,” says DeLong, who has years of experience supporting immigrants and international students. “I always tell them to get out of campus, talk to people and have meaningful times.”

Sharma and Singh, however, say that there is a serious need for international students to secure their basic accommodation and transportation before they really get used to the city.

“They need to have everything done before they come here,” says Singh. “We just don’t want them to suffer the thing which we had suffered.”