Navigating the maze of Canadian university applications

15 sec summary of post

intro- contrast with other countries’ university application

1. The geography of Canada and how it affects applications
2. Strategy for searching
3. Scholarship search through external website
4. Using Excel
5. Using Excel – extended
6. Main things to look for on university websites

Post

A few days ago, I was on a call with a student explaining the Canadian university application system (or rather systems). Truthfully, the amount of information available online is almost negligible compared to the incredible amount of information available for US applications. Why? There is not one Canadian application software for all Canadian universities: most universities use their own application software which you can access through their respective website. (Exception be for a few provinces, the main one being Ontario where students apply through the OUAC). 

For those who already got lost, some geography then. Canada is divided into provinces (think of it as Mauritian districts). Each province has its own system of governance and operates rather autonomously. Quebec more so than the others. This affects applications in 2 main ways: universities in some provinces tend to collaborate internally while others just don’t. That’s how the OUAC happened: Ontario-based universities (Ontario is a province) “teamed up” and agreed to process applications on a single software. However, this is not common in Canada. Most don’t team up and have their own software. 

The solution is NOT to go through every single Canadian university website (an option that appealed to me when applying to the US). No no, that is not worth your effort and time. Rather, you should really define your priorities: scholarship is a common one, and so is degree of interest, and location. You may also have other priorities. These should dictate how you go about the search. For the sake of this guide, I will consider “scholarship” to be the main priority.

Looking for universities through scholarship search

Although the most accurate source of scholarship information is the awarding body, you can use a quick Google search on “scholarships for xx degree in Canada” and find an external website initially. This might be better if you have 0 idea of where to start, since, even if the list of scholarships is outdated, you will still get a sense of where you can get a scholarship.

1. While checking a few websites, compile in an Excel a list of universities that seem to offer scholarships.
2. Once you have an initial list (consider having 20+ at this stage), figure out a list of financial considerations that are important to you. These could be tuition costs (course fees), living expenses, amount of scholarship possible, amount of scholarship reasonably obtained, and similar type of information.
3. Start labelling the columns on Excel with these considerations.
4. Check out this picture for an idea of how I personally did it (note that the data is outdated by now):

Next is really simple to say but very time-consuming in practice. Go to these universities’ website and start filling in the Excel. You will notice that your list will become shorter: that’s to be expected since some universities may not offer considerable scholarships.

Other considerations when applying

The 3 basic things to look for on a university website are: the program/degree that you are interested in, the admission process, and the financial aspect of going to that university. When you start noticing these things, you will see that you have many more questions. For example, what is a faculty, a department and a major and what are the differences? There, I’ll give you this one as homework. If you don’t figure it out, let me know and I’ll share it with you!