Going, Going, Gone!

Posted on by William Bishop

Today (Friday, February 19, 2021) is the last day to submit your Admission Information Form to complete your application to the Faculty of Engineering for undergraduate admission in Fall 2021. Make sure that all sections of the form have been completed and submitted. The Admission Information Form is a required part of the application process. Applicants who do not complete and submit the Admission Information Form will be denied an offer of admission.

Applicants will not have the ability to submit the Admission Information Form late. A planned update to our systems is scheduled for tomorrow so our systems will be offline for maintenance this weekend. We will do our final update of our AIF database on Monday in preparation for our early round of admission in late March.

A screenshot of the Quest login screen indicating Quest will be unavailable this weekend.

Every year, we receive several inquiries from applicants who unfortunately have missed the AIF submission deadline. Unless there exist well-documented extenuating circumstances such as a prolonged medical illness that prevented an applicant from completing the form, we cannot accommodate requests to submit the Admission Information Form after the official deadline. Such cases are extremely rare.

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.

34 thoughts on “Going, Going, Gone!”

  1. Hi there!
    I was looking over my submitted AIF and I noticed one of m EC’s has got their date wrong, it ended in 2019, but I have accidentally put the correct date and wrong year? I see that we can add amendments, but since the deadline has passed, would it help to do so? I am just worried that it may sound unrealistic with the dates I have now and wanted to clarify that.

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    1. We have already extracted a working copy of the AIF data from the system and we have already started working with the AIF data.

      While the system will not prevent you from making amendments, late amendments will not be seen by our admissions officers. The system is used by all University of Waterloo programs so the system does not “close” at the engineering deadline. Some programs have later deadlines.

      A small date error is common. It is not something that you should worry about. Our admissions officers are very good at interpreting data that contains small errors. A few small errors are unlikely to result in different admission decisions.

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      1. Hi Dr,

        Wondering if any transfer offers have been sent out? By transfer I mean transfers from other universities to UW engineering. If not, when should we expect something?

        Thanks

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      2. Students applying to transfer from other universities are part of the NOSS (105) admission pool. These offers will continue to be sent out for a couple of days. The NOSS admission offers take longer to verify and code. We started coding them last Thursday. It takes about a week for all of them to be processed.

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  2. When I copied my answers from google docs and pasted it to QUEST, I didn’t notice the inverted question mark which corresponds to an apostrophe. I made an amendment mentioning this small error. Will this significantly affect my AIF score? Thank you.

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  3. Hi! Earlier in one of your past posts, you mentioned that you expect this year’s admission cycle to have fewer applicants and that applicants will have a higher admission probability this year than last year. I was wondering if this still stands since you now have the data. Thanks.

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    1. Overall, our domestic application numbers increased and our international application numbers decreased. However, I believe that some of the increase that we observed in our domestic application data is related to the fact that applicants are applying to more programs than in previous admission cycles. For this reason, I believe the admission probabilities that I reported last year will likely be close to correct for most programs. There will always be exceptions.

      For international applicants, the admission probabilities are likely a bit better than I reported last year.

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  4. Hello Professor,

    I have read from your blog and other sources that around 50% of offers will go out during the late March round? Does this still hold true?

    If so, I wish you good luck, and would like to thank you for the hard work you and your team put in so that students can hear back earlier. It must be very challenging to grade thousands of AIFS and videos in a month!

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    1. We would like to announce 50% of our admission offers in the early round of admission. This target may not be achievable for all programs.

      We are currently assessing AIFs. We received over 10,000 AIFs from applicants this year so we have a challenging task ahead of us.

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  5. Hello Professor,

    Do university transfer students usually receive a “final” decision in March?

    I ask because the coop sequence I am in currently requires me to take a spring term and I would like to avoid the headache of enrolling and then withdrawing if I were to get an offer. Furthermore, my work term is in the fall for my current program and I would like to plan according.

    Thank you

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    1. Internal transfer students will be added to our databases in the next two weeks. Transfer students from other universities are already included in our databases. We consider transfer students at the same time as new admits.

      We carefully evaluate transfer students in the early round of admission. Most of the successful transfer students will be selected for transfers in our early round of admission. The remaining transfer students will need to wait until our final round of admission to get a definitive answer.

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  6. Hi Br. Bishop, hope you’re doing well. I realized that some of the courses (not pre-requisites) I am taking that I reported on my AIF do not appear on my OUAC. I have contacted my guidance counsellors and they are fixing the issue but I was wondering if this will affect my ability to receive an offer of admission. Thank you for your time!

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  8. Hello Professor, recently I received an offer of admission to another university with a deadline of May 1. Would requesting early consideration from Waterloo Engineering have a negative affect on my chances of receiving an offer? Additionally, what would be the rough deadline of when to request this? Thank you!

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    1. Our first round of admission offers will go out at the end of March. I would recommend waiting until after our first round of admission offers are communicated before requesting early consideration.

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  9. Hi Professor, I have heard that someone has already received an offer for UW Computer Engineering. Have some offers already been made? Thank you!

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  10. I qualified for the CCO this year and was wondering if it could be added to the AIF somehow, as it was a big achievement for me and the contest itself happened before the deadline (on the 17th).

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    1. Congratulations! This is quite an achievement.

      At this point in the process, the majority of the AIFs have been assessed. Our computer systems do not prevent updates of the AIF but we do not actively update our working copies after the AIF deadline. Otherwise, we would be constantly re-evaluating applicants who update their applications.

      The good news is that most competition results are published so we can see them.

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  11. Hi professor,
    I was wondering if there are any more 105 offers for the month of March or if the next batch of offers is in May?

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    1. The report I ran earlier today suggests that less than 1/3rd of all NOSS (105) offers have been processed. Nearly all of our OSS (101) offers have been processed. I expect NOSS (105) early admission offers to continue to be processed until the end of March.

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  13. Hi Bishop,
    I recently got accepted to ECE and was wondering when a good time would be to email and request steam 8. Also, would I need to accept my offer first to do so?

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  14. Hi Professor, have all the 101 offers for the March round been sent out for the SE program? Thank you!

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      1. Hi Prof. Bishop, I was wondering if all the early 101 offers for SYDE have been sent out. Thanks!

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