How Ashleigh Got Into McMaster Engineering by Treating It Like a Part-Time Job

There was a question on the McMaster supplementary application that I could not stop thinking about, and it was not even a written one. It was the live one. You sit down, the prompt appears, a timer starts, and you have to answer out loud, on camera, with no second draft. The summer before Grade 12, in Ontario, I would picture that little recording light blinking at me and feel my stomach drop. I wanted engineering at McMaster more than I wanted to admit. I just could not see myself getting through the door without freezing on the way in.

My dad is a guidance counsellor, so the language of applications and scholarships was always in the house. He kept gently pushing me toward it, telling me to apply, to put my name in for things, to start. And I had a list. I had been on the usual sites, Scholarships Canada, ScholarTree, all of it, with pages of general scholarships saved. The problem was that they all read the same. Vague questions anyone who could write a decent paragraph could answer. I looked at that list and felt nothing pull me forward. Where do I even begin, and why would I be the one who wins?

The Push to Actually Start

I joined AdmissionPrep at the beginning of September of my Grade 12 year. Looking back, that timing mattered more than I knew. I was not lacking ability. I do well in school, I think I am a decent writer. What I was lacking was a reason to sit down and begin when the questions felt boring and the payoff felt far away.

What I found was not someone to do the work for me. It was structure, and people who had done this before, and a way of treating the whole thing that finally made sense to me. We had office hours where I could talk to someone the same day a question came up. Emails came back the next morning, not the next week. For the first time, the process stopped feeling like a wall and started feeling like a job I knew how to show up for.

My Twenty-Thousand-Dollar Goal

Here is the decision that changed everything for me. Right at the start, I told myself I was going to win twenty thousand dollars in scholarships. Not someday. This cycle. I wrote it down and I made it real.

Then I did something that sounds small and was not. I started treating applications like a part-time job. I do not have a paying one, so this became it. I blocked out hours. I set time aside the way you would for a shift you could not skip, and I told myself that if I put the time in, I would be rewarded for it. Time management was the whole game. Not talent, not luck. Just deciding that this was work worth showing up for, and then showing up.

The People Who Edited Every Word

I came in thinking I could write. I left understanding what writing under real feedback actually does. The work the team at AdmissionPrep put into editing my essays was honestly a little insane. Round after round, line after line, until a scattered answer became something that sounded like me at my sharpest.

And it was not only essays. Through the modules and the webinars I built a cover letter and a resume I was proud of, and picked up interview skills that would have helped me with the McMaster video if I had walked in with them. Every single thing I had been quietly worried about, how to present myself, how to write an application that wins, what to even say when the camera is on, had an answer waiting for it. The relationship was the part I did not expect. Real people, face to face, who knew me well enough to notice I had gotten a haircut.

The Video That Scared Me Most

If you take one thing from my story, take this. The thing you are most afraid of in your application is usually the thing you have not started yet.

For me that was the McMaster supplementary, and specifically the live video answer. A timed prompt, spoken out loud, recorded. For months it sat in my head as the impossible part, the place I was sure I would lock up and lose the whole thing. I had taught myself to be confident on paper. On camera, with a clock running, I had no such confidence to lean on.

So I stopped letting it be a monster in the corner and started treating it like every other shift on the job. I leaned on the interview tips I had picked up and prepared the way I had learned to prepare for everything else. And then I did it. I submitted the supplementary, the live answer and all, and I got into McMaster Engineering, the exact program I wanted. The thing I had been most scared of became the thing I had already beaten.

The Offers Started Coming

By the spring I had applied to around eleven scholarships, with about fifteen more lined up and waiting. These were not the vague ones from my old list. They were targeted to my strengths, my academics, my community involvement, the kind where I would read the prompt and quietly think, I could actually win this one.

And I did. Roughly thirty thousand dollars in competitive scholarship offers across schools, past the twenty thousand I had set out to win. But the dollar figure was never really the prize. The prize was walking into my first choice university with money already in my pocket and the proof that the work pays. Six months earlier I had no idea what I was going to do. Now I was calm, excited, and lighter in a way my friends could see, and even my Grade 12 schoolwork felt better, because I was finally moving toward something instead of dreading it.

The Word: Motivation

If I had to put this whole journey into one word, it would be motivation.

Not the loud kind. Not the kind you feel for a day and lose by the weekend. The quiet, repeatable kind. There were plenty of nights I did not want to sit down and write an essay about some bizarre prompt. What got me through was a simple thought I kept coming back to. There are a lot of people who do not want to do this either, and most of them will not. If I do, I will be the one who is rewarded for it.

That is the part nobody tells you. Every student feels the same resistance, the same pull toward that is too much time, too much effort, I do not want to. The ones who succeed are the ones who learn to step outside that feeling and do the work anyway. Once I had won even a little, the motivation fed itself. Success made the next application easier to start, and the one after that easier still.

A Note to the Next Grade 11 Kid

Start with a goal. A real number, a real program, something you can point at when the work feels pointless. Mine was twenty thousand dollars and a seat in McMaster Engineering, and on the days I did not feel like writing, that goal did the deciding for me. Have something you are striving for, then manage your time around it like it matters. Set aside hours for school, for yourself, and for your applications, and treat that last block like a part-time job you would never skip.

And if you are a parent reading this, maybe a guidance counsellor like my dad, here is the honest filter. This program does not hand a student their results. It gives a motivated student the structure, the feedback, and the steady support to go and earn them. If your child is willing to commit on day one and run with the help they are given, this is the right kind of program for them. The motivation has to be theirs. Everything else can be taught.

Where I Stand Today

Six months ago I was nervous about a blinking record light and a list of scholarships I could not bring myself to start. Today I am headed to McMaster for engineering, the program I wanted from the beginning, with around thirty thousand dollars in offers behind me and a stack of applications I am still happily working through. People keep telling me I look lighter. I think I just finally know what I am working toward.

Motivation is not something you are born with or you are not. It is a thing you build, one finished application at a time, until the wanting turns into doing and the doing starts to win.