admission decisions

Considering an Alternate Offer 2014

/ profbillanderson / 32 Comments

Here’s an updated re-post from 2013, which might be useful.

When people apply to Waterloo Engineering, they apply to the program of most interest but can also identify a second and third choice on their AIF.  That way, if they are not quite competitive for the 1st choice, we can still consider them for one of the other two.  We assume that the choices are ranked in descending order of preference, so we try to get the 2nd choice if possible, then the 3rd.  Typically around 300 to 350 people get one of these alternate offers to their 2nd or 3rd choice (not a target, just a typical number each year).  Some people are quite happy with their alternate offer.  Others, not so much.  Those holding an alternate offer will have to decide what to do with it, so here are a few questions that commonly come up. Continue reading →

Final Admission Round 2014

/ profbillanderson / 159 Comments

After many hours of review and work by the admissions team, the final set of admissions decisions are done.  I’ll just summarize a few things for now.

  1. Offers are being posted to Quest initially, and will get updated on OUAC in the next few days.  Ontario (OUAC 101) offers come out first (like today), and out of province (OUAC 105) offers take a few more days to process, so probably by the end of this week.
  2. Emails should go out shortly too (I think).  Mailed packages take a bit more time to assemble and deliver.
  3. As we suspected, competition for the limited number of spaces was higher again this year, about 1,000 more applications than last year.  At the end, we received a bit over 10,000 applications, and made about 3,000 offers.  This should give us about 1,600 new students in September, which is our target.  On the downside, there will be about 7,000 disappointed applicants.
  4. At first glance, it seems that the increased competition pushed up the typical admission averages by about 1% across all the programs.  We will have to update our admission stats for the 2015 cycle in the coming weeks.
  5. Some people will call the office to find out why they didn’t get an offer, or didn’t get their first choice program.  It’s a bit pointless however, since the answer is always the same…in the ranked list of applicants, the program was filled before we got down to that part of the list.  In many programs we were filling the last few spots with applicants having low 90s averages, and there were still 500+ applicants left in the list.
  6. We will have a waitlist for those who want to be reconsidered in June if there are any open spaces.  You can ask to be put on the waitlist by emailing enginfo@uwaterloo.ca with your name, ID# and desired program.
  7. I see that there are dozens of comments on other posts that I haven’t had time to address.  Sorry, but I’ll have to delete most of them and start fresh, unless they are key questions of general interest.

April 2014 Admissions Update

/ profbillanderson / 46 Comments

Things continue to be extremely busy, so many of my planned posts are postponed.  Here are a few random comments that might be of interest.

  1. In late March we sent out a couple of hundred more offers to applicants from outside of Ontario.  By our estimates, most programs have now committed 40 to 50% of the available spaces.  We will give these remaining spaces away in the final round in early May.
  2. Currently, we’re waiting for the Ontario schools’ second semester mid-term grades to be uploaded.  And we’re frantically working through the remaining document submissions from the non-Ontario applicants.  Everything should be done by late April so we can do the early May offers.
  3. As soon as the early May offers are finalized, we will also make the scholarship decisions for all the offer holders (including those from the earlier rounds).
  4. Final application numbers are in, and it looks like we had a record number of applicants again this year.  Over 10,000 in total, for about 1,600 available spots.
  5. While scanning through some data, I noticed that one applicant had ranked Waterloo Engineering as #31 on OUAC (this might be a record in my experience).  As I have posted in the past, we don’t really care what ranking an applicant puts us as; if the grades are competitive we will make an offer.  But I have to wonder about people who are applying to so many programs (and spending so much money for the applications!).  And this is not an isolated case; there are a bunch that rank us in the 20s.  Surely they could be a bit more strategic and selective about their applications? When I was in high school (a long time ago, admittedly), we were only allowed to apply to a maximum of 3 programs.
  6. The AIF reading and scoring is pretty much done now.  Every year there are a bunch of applicants who didn’t press “Submit” for every part of the AIF (in spite of email reminders), so it doesn’t get read and scored because it’s not fully completed.  Unfortunately they won’t get any significant AIF bonus.
  7. We’re starting to finalize plans for our open house on May 24 for admitted students.  Hopefully the weather will be nicer by then!
  8. New this year, some of our 4th year design groups submitted 90 second videos to describe their “capstone” projects.  These can be viewed on our Youtube channel.  I haven’t had time to look at them all, but there are some very interesting ones, and they give a nice flavour of what some students do.
  9. Various other interesting items appear on our Facebook page.  I highly recommend it for exploring Waterloo Engineering activities and news, since it covers much more than I have time to look at.

That’s all for now.  More later, when I finish up some of the more pressing items.

 

Early Offers 2014

/ profbillanderson / 298 Comments

A revised and updated version of a post from 2013.

We just finished (February 20) processing our first round of offers for applicants who are Ontario high school students, and they have been posted in Quest.  It may take a few more days for OUAC to be updated and emails to go out.  Some of the processes were described in an earlier post, How to Get an Early Offer (which may be a bit outdated for 2014).  But to summarize, we took the data we had at that point and made enough offers to fill up to 1/3 of our available spaces in each program (more specifically, those spaces reserved for Canadians and Permanent Residents).  These are applications where we have enough data and it’s clear that they are competitive, based on previous experience.  We were quite conservative this year, and  gave out fewer offers than in 2013, since we want to leave lots of spaces for a fair competition in the final round in May.  In part, this is because application numbers are up significantly again this year and it’s hard to distinguish fairly between applicants when there are so many with similar grades.  So we think it’s better to hold off until the most complete data is available in late April.  We’ll be processing some non-Ontario applicant offers in the coming weeks.

Some universities give out a lot more earlier offers, but that’s simply because they have a lot less competition for spaces and can just go ahead with whatever they have. Continue reading →

What are Extracurriculars?

/ profbillanderson / 23 Comments

When faced with the task of submitting our Admission Information Form (AIF), there is sometimes some confusion over what to list in the “Extracurriculars” section.  According to some dictionaries, “extracurricular” refers to activities at a school, but outside the regular classroom (or curriculum).  While that is true, for university admissions the definition is usually much broader in practice.  So, extracurriculars are not just school clubs and sports.  We look for anything that takes place outside of a classroom, whether organized through the school or not.  This would include activities with community groups, religious organizations, political and activist groups, recreational or competitive sports with community organizations (e.g. hockey and soccer leagues), cultural groups (theatre, choir, orchestra, art), cadets (army, navy and air) and scouts, and many other similar things.

It also includes things you might do on a more individual level, like music (perhaps Grade 8 or 10 RCM exams, or a band or performing group), art/photography, skiing, landscaping, automotive restoration, etc.  It will also include hobby types of activities, like writing poetry or blogs, reading 19th century literature, music, model trains, writing software, raising show dogs or horses, gaming, stock market investing, …

So, for our purposes “extracurricular” means essentially anything outside the classroom.  If it’s something you’re truly interested in and spend some time at, then certainly list it.  This is your chance to show us more about who you are, aside from the grades we see on transcripts.

On the other hand, don’t make a long list of little things that you tried for a few hours now and then.  It is not impressive.  Stick with the significant things you’ve done over a long period, or that required a lot of hours over a short period.

Don’t worry if you only have a few extracurriculars.  That is actually fairly normal and completely understandable.  Also don’t worry if your extracurriculars are not “engineering” related.  We don’t really expect them to be.  Again, this is about you telling us about yourself.  We don’t have any preconceived notions about what people should do in their spare time, so don’t try to second guess what it is we are looking for.

CEGEP Applicants

/ profbillanderson / 8 Comments

At our recent Fall Open House I met several prospective applicants who are enrolled in the CEGEP system.  That’s a long trip for a few hours at an open house, but it was nice to meet them.

The Province of Québec has a somewhat unique junior college system that starts after Grade 11, called CEGEP.  We don’t get a whole lot of applicants from CEGEPs, but we certainly admit a few each year and they tend to do quite well in our engineering programs.

The posted admission requirements for CEGEP are:

Linear Algebra; 2 English 603 or 604 series; Calculus I (Calculus II recommended); Chemistry I and II; and Mechanics plus either Electricity & Magnetism; or Waves, Optics & Modern Physics, with a total of 12 academic courses.

It’s sometimes difficult for CEGEP students to complete all those courses in their first year (especially Linear Algebra), so many applicants come from the second year of CEGEP.  Since our programs are designed with to work with the Ontario high school curriculum, CEGEP applicants tend to be over-prepared (which is probably why they do so well), but that’s better than being under-prepared.

The good news is that our generic posted admission averages don’t really directly apply to CEGEP applicants.  Our adjustment factors for CEGEP will allow for applicants with average grades (for the required courses) in the low 80’s to have a decent chance at admission to most programs (but as usual, the higher the grades the better).  So CEGEP applicants should pay no attention to stuff they see online about needing 90s or 95s to get into Waterloo.

Looking at Admission Essays

/ profbillanderson / 15 Comments

I came across these examples of admissions essays at Johns Hopkins University a while ago:  http://apply.jhu.edu/apply/essays.html

They are interesting, engaging, witty, nicely written.  But frankly, I’m glad we don’t make our applicants submit essays.  I think I much prefer our Admission Information Form.  Much more brief, to the point, quicker to read  (sort of what an engineering report should be).

I know from other reading that there are various concerns with these college admission essays.  How much of it is the work of the applicant, versus parents or admissions consultants?  Was it purchased or plagiarised from somewhere? (There is a Turnitin for Admissions service that some universities use to check for that.) Does a good essay translate into a good engineering student?  Lots of questions, and not so many answers.

Some of our applicants complain about having to fill out our AIF.  I suspect that they would like submitting an essay even less.

Chances for 2014

/ profbillanderson / 170 Comments

The 2014 Admissions brochures for Engineering and other programs have recently been uploaded.  Last year, for the first time, we included a table showing admission probabilities (“chances”) for different programs and grade ranges.  It seemed to be well-received and many people found it to be useful, so we revised and updated a new one for 2014.  Below is a copy of it (sorry about the image quality).  This is based on the 2013 results and as usual we caution that 2014 may be different, since it all depends on the competition level (which is unknown in advance). Continue reading →

Switching Engineering Programs

/ profbillanderson / 108 Comments

A prior post dealt with transferring into Waterloo Engineering from some other program or university.  More frequently, the question is “can I switch to X Engineering if I start in Y Engineering?” (where X and Y are two of our own engineering programs).  This is an “internal transfer” process, so no OUAC application is necessary and there is a bit more flexibility.  But it is also potentially more confusing, so let’s look at some scenarios. Continue reading →