Requesting Early Consideration

Posted on by William Bishop

I have been contacted by a handful of applicants who currently have offers of admission to excellent engineering programs at out-of-province institutions.  As you have probably discovered, out-of-province institutions often have different acceptance deadlines and some of them are earlier than the Ontario deadline.  At the University of Waterloo, we offer applicants the opportunity to request early consideration of their application in such circumstances.

If you have received an offer of admission from another university that is requiring you to accept or decline the offer by early May and you do not currently have an early offer of admission to Waterloo Engineering, please contact the Engineering Admissions team by e-mailing enginfo@uwaterloo.ca.  When sending your e-mail, attach proof of your offer and the acceptance deadline from the other institution.  If you e-mail us prior to April 1st, we will review your application and make a final decision on your application by April 17th.  This will allow you to make an informed choice about your future university studies.

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Please keep in mind that applicants who request early consideration will not be reconsidered during our final admission round in mid-May.  We request that only those applicants requiring a final decision in mid-April contact our office to request early consideration.  This allows us to prioritize those applicants who have earlier deadlines to meet.

 

Published by William Bishop

I grew up in the small town of Welland, Ontario in the heart of the Niagara Peninsula. In my youth, I enjoyed softball, golf, and the uniquely Canadian sport of 5-pin bowling. My high school years were productive. I excelled at my studies and had enough time to devote towards extra-curricular activities to earn a school letter. I was fascinated with computers having owned a Commodore 64 and having maintained a network of Unisys machines running a very early version of QNX at my local high school. I had part-time jobs teaching computer courses to both adults and children at local secondary schools. I worked hard in my final year of high school to excel at the now defunct Descartes math competition and earn a spot in Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Little did I know that I would stay at the university for three degrees and eventually a permanent faculty position. Now, as Director of Admissions for Waterloo Engineering, I hope to share my thoughts on the road towards a career engineering.

20 thoughts on “Requesting Early Consideration”

    1. Requesting early consideration does not significantly increase or decrease the chance of getting an admission offer for students with consistently good grades. For students with improving grades, asking for early consideration might slightly reduce your chance of getting an admission offer. For students with decreasing grades, asking for early consideration might slightly increase your chance of getting an admission offer.

      Keep in mind that we only give early consideration to students with admission offers to universities that have earlier deadlines for acceptance. To request early consideration, e-mail proof of your admission offer to enginfo@uwaterloo.ca along with your request for early consideration.

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  2. Would it be okay for students to double deposit? If I want to be in the may round but deposit at a US university, and if I get into Waterloo I go to Waterloo instead of the US university? This is done usually when a student is waitlisted at university A, deposited at university B, gets off the waitlist and goes to University A. Is this allowed?

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    1. Applicants should not accept an admission offer to a university and then turn down the admission offer if a “better” admission offer comes along. Similarly, there should be no need to pay deposits at two different universities. The correct course of action is to inform universities that have not yet issued admission offers to you that you have pending admission offers that require paying a deposit earlier than the Ontario deadline. This is a relatively common occurrence. We have a flag in our database to indicate that an applicant needs an early decision in April. This flag is set when a student contacts us with proof of an admission offer requiring an early decision.

      You never know where you will be in 5 years. You may find yourself applying to graduate studies. You want to keep all of your future options open.

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  3. Is it possible to get deffered to a program with lower requirements if you request an early admission.

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  4. Are the Euclid and CCC scores taken into consideration if you request early consideration for engineering?

    -Thanks

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      1. How would this work for early consideration since the Euclid exam will be written at the start of April. This would leave very little time for marking.

        -Thanks

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    1. I do not know the Math Faculty process. I have heard that the Math Faculty has made a few changes to its admission process this year. I suggest contacting them directly for questions on the Math Faculty admission process.

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  6. Can I email the admission office now to change my major of interest if I have not received an offer yet? Will it lower my chances of getting accepted compared to the other applicants who have the program as their original first choice?

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  7. If we request for early consideration but we do not yet have a Calculus and Vectors mark in our top 6 average, will our advanced functions mark be doubled when our top 6 is calculated?

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    1. This appears to be true for Ontario Secondary School students, provided we do not have a midterm grade for Calculus and Vectors. Please note that our methods of predicting final grades for courses are always subject to change. The fact that we currently predict the grade as you suggest does not mean that we will continue to do so in the future.

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  8. I got an out-of-province offer a few days before April 1st and only see that I would have needed to send an email by April 1st now. Is it too late for me to even try requesting early consideration? The deadline for the out-of-province offer is May 1st.

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    1. Yes, unfortunately our early consideration round has already begun. We received over 300 requests for early consideration this year. Each request requires us to prioritize these applications for consideration. Since these early requests result in final decisions, we do our best to verify the application data prior to making our decisions. Given the tight timelines, we are not able to accommodate any more early consideration requests this year. We understand that this puts you in a very difficult situation. This is why we recommend that all students with pending offers requiring early acceptance notify us as soon as they are aware of the pending offer.

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  9. Thank you for taking this initiative, something many institutions would rather not undertake given it’s time-constraining nature. I have just received my offer for ME and now I can definitely make a more well-informed decision, as can those 300+ students you had previously mentioned.

    However I also remember opting in for the Suncor Emerging Leaders Awards Program (Scholarship) which was open for a few programs; I was just hoping if you’d know whether the recipients of these awards have already been notified? If not, when can the recipients expect a status update?

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    1. First, congratulations on receiving admission to Mechanical Engineering at the University of Waterloo! This is a significant achievement. The ME program had a very strong applicant pool this year.

      The only scholarships included in early offers are the automatic ones based on decision averages. You may receive additional scholarships in mid-May when we consider all admitted students for named scholarships. The Suncor Emerging Leaders Awards Program is one of the programs that I believe is announced in mid-May. In an ideal world, we would be able to give you all of your scholarships with your early offer but we often do not have enough grade information to make an informed assessment for all admitted students. We had to scramble to assess the AIFs, interviews, and grades of all students requiring early consideration. Now, our admissions team is working on finishing the assessments of the rest of the applicants in preparation for our final admission round in mid-May. When we do our final round, we will select scholarship recipients from the pool of all admitted students.

      One secondary benefit of delaying the scholarship decisions is that it helps motivate some students to continue studying their high school courses for another month. Our team has read (sadly) that a few admitted applicants are trying to figure out how little homework they need to complete to maintain the minimum requirements for meeting conditions of their offers. In general, this is a very bad idea. The calculus course that most students complete this term is probably the single most important course you take in preparation for engineering.

      Once applicants have an offer in hand for university, they should think about how best to prepare for the transition. For some, this may mean getting a job to save up for tuition. For others, this may mean learning a programming language or taking a course at a community college. For a few, it may even mean learning some important life skills such as cooking and cleaning. Every applicant is unique. No one approach fits all. I am sure you will figure out what you need to do to prepare further for university. I look forward to meeting you soon.

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