Info for BC Cancer Students

Main entrance of the Island Cancer Center

The astute student in Medical Physics at UVic will notice that sometimes they are not at UVic but in fact are at the BC Cancer Center attached to the Jubilee hospital in Victoria. If you find yourself in this situation don’t panic, it is completely normal to be at the BC Cancer Center and it does not mean that you have been diagnosed with a non-communicable disease.

Vancouver Island Cancer Center

Credit: Michal Klajban, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

BC Cancer Supervisor

The UVic Medical Physics Program is a joint program between BC Cancer and UVic as well as UBC and its various franchises throughout the province. Students may be supervised by a Professor at UVic or a Medical Physicist at BC Cancer. 

While students supervised by a UVic professor will have been assigned a supervisor upon entry to their program, BC Cancer supervised students will be accepted before being assigned a supervisor. Thus if you happen to be in such a state of limbo, don’t worry too much, but do try to suck up to your adjunct BC Cancer professors.

Supervisors at BC Cancer generally are quite a bit busier than professors at UVic as they have to actually cure cancer in their day to day rather than produce the hypothetical cancer curing postulations in research. So expect to work a little more independently but with a more clinically relevant project if your supervisor resides at BC Cancer.

Medical Physics Internships (Quality Assurance)

Medical Physics students have the opportunity to participate in quality assurance internships at the cancer centre here. These internships run for 4 months (in line with the school semesters) and there are 2 positions per semester. These students will perform monthly QA on the linear accelerators at the clinic. Due to the limited number of internships per year, priority is given first to certificate students, then residency-bound students, then students who have not performed QA before here in Victoria, and finally to older students. Please note that you cannot perform both QA and a TA in the same semester without explicit permission from your supervisor. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to reach out to PAGSA's Medical Physics Rep.

TRIUMF and others

UVic also has adjunct Medical Physics faculty at TRIUMF and some students may be supervised by faculty at UBC, TRIUMF, or UBCO.