How Daphne Got Into McMaster Engineering While Keeping Med School on the Table

For most of high school I thought you were supposed to walk into Grade 12 with the rest of your life already decided. One school. One program. One straight line. I did not have that line. What I had was a pull toward engineering and a quieter pull toward medicine, and a stubborn unwillingness to give up either one before I had to. What if I do not have to choose yet? What if the smartest move is to keep both doors open?

That question is where my whole application year started. Not with an essay or a deadline, but with a decision to be deliberate about every step instead of guessing and hoping it worked out. I did not want to do the bare minimum and find out in April whether it was enough. I wanted to walk into this on purpose.

Choosing to Keep Both Doors Open

The first real choice I made was the program itself. I am heading to McMaster University this fall for engineering, and it was my top choice the whole way through. But I did not apply to a narrow stream. I chose a general first year on purpose, so I can feel out where engineering wants to take me before I commit to a stream. Engineering also keeps a path to med school open, and medicine is still on the table.

So that is what I built toward: a degree that does not force the decision before I am ready. I applied broadly to other schools too, not because I was unsure of McMaster, but because options are leverage. When the offers came in, I wanted to be the one choosing, not the one hoping a single envelope said yes.

Building the Schedule That Made It Possible

Keeping doors open is a nice idea until you see what it costs in course selection. Every program I was considering had its own prerequisites, and to cover all of them I needed a schedule that scared me a little. AP Sciences. AP Maths. A stack heavy enough that I started preparing for it before the school year even began.

I started with AdmissionPrep in Grade 11, and that head start is a big part of why none of this buried me. By the time most people are just realizing applications exist, I had done one over the summer, and spent real time reading through scholarships and schools myself, deciding which ones actually fit me instead of casting a blind net. I was building a resume too, working part time, volunteering, dancing, all at once. The heavy load was not an accident. It was the price of the options I wanted, and I paid it on purpose.

The Four Months on My Wall

Here is the honest truth about my year: my single biggest struggle, start to finish, was time management. School, dance, a part time job, volunteering, and a social life I was not willing to delete. Something had to hold all of it together, and willpower alone was never going to be it.

So I built a system. I have a whiteboard calendar on my wall that shows four months at a time. On it I write everything: assignments, exams and tests, and every scholarship deadline. Not just when each application was due, but how early I needed it in so the AdmissionPrep team could review it and send it back corrected before the real deadline. That last part is the trick most people miss. A deadline is not the day it is due. It is the day you have to be finished so the people helping you still have time to make it better.

I also blocked out time for plain schoolwork, so that when a scholarship snuck up on me and I had a single day to write it, that day was free instead of traded against an assignment I had ignored. Planning ahead was never about being organized for its own sake. It was about never being cornered.

Becoming the Person, Not Just Winning the Prize

I went into this thinking the program would help me figure out my future and maybe win some money, and that would be that. What I did not expect was that it would change who I was willing to be.

Before, I will be honest, I was not doing a lot. Sports, schoolwork, a little volunteering, and I told myself that was enough. Then I understood what it actually takes to win scholarships, and I stepped it up. I got more involved in my school and my community, not for a checkbox, but because somewhere in there it stopped feeling like a task. Getting into my dream school, that was for me. But helping other people was something else, and more fulfilling than I expected anything on a resume to be.

That is the part I will carry forward no matter where I land. I came in chasing an outcome and walked out a better person, and I did not see that one coming.

When the Plan Met Reality

If you take one thing from my story, take this: have goals, but do not white knuckle a single fixed plan. Stuff happens. You will miss a scholarship. You will mess up a deadline. And if you beat yourself up every time the road bends, you will run out of fuel before you run out of road.

I learned that the slow way. At the start I was overwhelmed. I looked at the mountain of it and thought, this is so much work, what am I even going to get out of this. So I told myself I would do the bare minimum and hope it was fine.

What turned it around was a sentence I kept hearing in the videos, from someone named Madison: you are not just going to become a person who wins scholarships, you are going to become the type of person who wins scholarships. The first few times it washed over me. Then one day it landed, and I realized how true it was. The minute I stopped doing the minimum and actually embraced the process, everything got easier, because I was no longer fighting it.

The Word: Intentionality

If I had to put this whole year into one word, it would be intentionality.

Every piece of it was a choice I made on purpose instead of letting it happen to me. A general first year, to keep engineering and medicine both alive. Applying broadly, so the decision would be mine. Front loading a brutal AP schedule, because I had decided which doors I wanted open. Mapping four months on a wall, so nothing could ambush me. None of those were the bare minimum. Every one was a small, deliberate decision, and stacked together they are the whole reason I get to write this. The result was never going to be one lucky break. It was going to be a hundred intentional ones.

A Note to the Next Grade 11 Kid

Come in with goals, not a script. It is okay if you do not know exactly which program you want. It is okay if you cannot name a dollar figure you are chasing. Set real goals, then expect bumps on the way to them, because they are coming. The students who break are not the ones who hit a bump. They are the ones who thought the road would be straight.

Build a system you can actually see. A four month calendar on the wall did more for me than any burst of motivation, because motivation comes and goes and a whiteboard just sits there reminding you. And start before you think you need to. The Grade 11 program is why a schedule that should have crushed me did not.

If you are a parent reading this, here is the honest filter. This is the right kind of program for the kid who is willing to be deliberate, who will take feedback and submit the work early enough to actually use it, who wants to be guided rather than carried. It will not do the work for them. It will teach them to do the work on purpose, a skill they keep long after the applications close.

Where I Stand Today

I still do not know whether I will end up an engineer or a doctor, and for once that does not scare me. I designed my year so that not knowing is a feature, not a failure. Both doors are open because I chose to keep them open, and that choice is the proudest thing I built.

A year ago I was overwhelmed enough to consider doing the bare minimum. Today I am heading to McMaster for engineering, with medicine still within reach. Nobody hands you a future like that. You decide your way into it, one intentional step at a time, until the doors you wanted are the ones standing open.