The Next Step: University Applications

Hi everyone! My name is Ailee and I am a Grade 11 student at Sentinel Secondary School in BC. Today, I had the pleasure to attend Jodi Buckley’s Think Tank on “The World of University Admissions” as a part of the Associate National Lead program. It was a fantastic experience to be able to learn more about applying to university as it is one of the tasks that I will be doing in the near future. Overall, the information was incredibly helpful and I would like to share my takeaways from today’s think tank.

Firstly, I had learned many helpful facts about the application process when applying for university. I now understand that I would need to navigate many different platforms—such as OUAC and EducationPlannerBC—for my university applications depending on the university or college. Further, I learned that, in many cases, there is a supplementary application. Previously, I thought that universities would only be looking at the initial application. Learning about the supplementary application allowed me to understand more about what additional information universities would be looking for. I also found out that there are different deadlines for the many different universities. Jodi also walked us through the university websites and taught us how to find many deadlines for the applications. I would highly recommend anyone applying to universities to do the same process of understanding the deadlines.

Moreover, we had talked about one of the major components of the supplementary application: an interview. Jodi had shared many tips when proceeding with an interview and also allowed us to try out the interview process by placing us into groups and taking turns asking interview questions. This entire process allowed us to gain an even deeper understanding of the entire interview process and was extremely beneficial.

Lastly, I would like to share one of the many tips which I have learned. The most helpful “tip” or method that I learned today was the “STAR method” which can be used when answering situational questions during an interview. The letters stand for Situation, Task, Action and Result. In simple words, when answering questions, you must first introduce the situation, describe your task and what you need to do, explain what actions you took (the solution), and explain what the results of your actions were (positive impacts you made).

Overall, this think tank was a wonderful opportunity to understand more about university applications as I will soon be going though the same process.