University of Canterbury

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The University of Canterbury (UC) was founded in 1873 by scholars from Oxford and Cambridge. It is in Christchurch, the largest city in the South Island of New Zealand.
Christchurch is between the South Pacific Ocean and the Southern Alps, giving students at UC access to all the amenities of a cosmopolitan, international city while allowing them to still be just a few minutes from beaches and the ocean, and within an hour’s drive of alpine mountains, national parks, ski fields, rivers, and wineries.
The University has five Colleges: Engineering, Education, Health and Human Development, Arts, Science, and Business and Law. In 2020, Times Higher Education recognised Canterbury as a top international university, praising its international outlook in teaching, research, and graduates’ job prospects.
UC’s programmes, teaching and research are all recognised internationally as being of the highest quality. In 2019, QS ranked UC in the top 1% of all universities globally, while the University’s programmes in linguistics and civil and structural engineering ranked in the world’s top 100. Canterbury’s programmes in finance, geography, geology, law, taxation and accounting all rank in the top 150 worldwide; programmes in political science, education, environmental science, philosophy, international relations, sociology and teacher education rank in the top 200.
The University has the most extensive network of field stations for research of any New Zealand university, with sites spread from Antarctica to Nigeria, and the country’s leading astronomical research facility at Mt John, Tekapo. In May 2020, UC astronomers in Tekapo announced a one-in-million discovery of a new ‘Super-Earth’ planet near the centre of the galaxy.
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