How Kseniya Got Into UBC Pharmaceutical Sciences

In Grade 11, all I really knew about getting into university was a handful of words I had heard repeated since freshman year. Good grades. Student leadership. Maybe some leadership skills on top of that, whatever that meant. Nobody had ever shown me what a real application looked like, so that short list was my whole map. If this is the most competitive thing I will ever do, why does no one know how to explain it?

So I did the only thing the list told me to do. I threw myself at everything. Clubs, extracurriculars, a part-time job, whatever I could sign up for. But I had never written a scholarship application, never written a university application, never even read one. The whole process sat out there like a city I could see but had no road into, and the closer Grade 12 got, the bigger it grew. I was clueless, and I was about to find out exactly how clueless.

The Program That Knew the Road

I joined AdmissionPrep at the end of September in my Grade 12 year. I did not come in looking for someone to do the work for me. I came in looking for the road itself, the thing nobody had ever drawn for me, and a few people who had already walked it.

What I found was a structure. A course that broke the impossible down into steps I could actually take, and mentorship calls with people who had been exactly where I was, sometimes only a year or two earlier. They did not hand me answers. They handed me a way to find my own, then checked in often enough that I never drifted off the path. For the first time, the city in the distance had streets.

The Things I Built Before I Knew Why

Here is what I did not understand until much later. So much of admissions is not what you do in Grade 12. It is what you already did before you ever heard the word application.

Long before any of this, I joined sports teams because I loved them. I played volleyball and rugby. I joined a community leadership class at my school, and that one choice opened everything. Through it I ran two fundraisers, one for the Canadian Cancer Society and one for Covenant House Vancouver, which supports homeless youth. I joined Big Brothers of Greater Vancouver. I became a lifeguard and a swim instructor. None of it was for a checkbox. But somewhere in the middle of it I noticed a thread. I love working with youth, and I love giving back close to home where I can see the impact. By the time applications opened, those scattered activities were not a list anymore. They were one story, and the story was mine.

The Mentors Who Kept Me Moving

The mentorship calls were the thing that kept me upright. The people on the other end were supportive and genuinely motivating, and the simple truth is that I wanted to be where they were. They were in university, building lives they had chosen. You sit across from someone who made it through the exact thing you are afraid of, and a quiet voice in you says, they did it, so it is possible.

More than the motivation, they gave me feedback. Round after round of it. Every time I doubted whether my writing was any good, someone on the other side of the essay told me the truth and showed me how to make it better. That external support did something I could not do for myself in September. It made me believe I belonged in the running.

The Two Months It Took to Find My Voice

If you take one thing from my story, take this. The hardest part was never the deadlines. It was learning to write honestly about myself from scratch.

When I started, I was overwhelmed before I had written a single word. There were something like sixty scholarships in front of me, and I sat there stunned. I thought I had good time management until that pile landed on my desk. So I did the only thing that made it survivable. I scheduled it. I broke it down. I picked the high-priority ones first and ignored the rest for a moment. And then I hit the real wall, which is that talking about yourself genuinely, on paper, is so much harder than it sounds. High school is not built for that kind of writing, and I had no practice in it.

It took me about two full months to find my own writing voice. Two months of editing, of running essays through the team, of starting over. And then something clicked. I had a base of ten or twelve essays, and suddenly I could take what I had built, reshape it, and send it into the next application. The system started to carry itself. What had felt impossible in October felt almost easy by spring. But I had to write through the hard part first.

The Application That Mattered Most

UBC Pharmaceutical Sciences was my top choice, and I knew it. So the moment my writing started to turn the corner, in early November, I pointed everything at it. I treated that application like the one that counted, because to me it did.

UBC has an early-acceptance round with a December 1 deadline, and I made it my mission to be ready. I started writing weeks ahead, ran it through round after round of editing, and submitted it early. Then I waited. And the answer came back yes. I was in. Pharmaceutical Sciences, the exact program I had wanted, before most students had even finished their first drafts.

What Actually Set Me Apart

For a long time I assumed the students who win the big awards must simply have done more than me. Then I reached the level of something like the UBC President's Scholarship, and I learned the truth. At that level, everyone has done a lot. The other applicants were involved exactly the way I was, close to me in every way that shows up on a resume.

So the activities were not the differentiator. How clearly I could articulate them was. What separated me was how plainly I could name the impact I had actually made, and how authentic it read on the page. A scholarship committee or an admissions team can feel the difference between a list and a person. The work was real, and once I learned to say it honestly, that honesty came through. That, more than any single accomplishment, is what carried me.

The Word: Consistency

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

I was not the student who submitted one application in a panic and called it done. I worked the process the same way, week after week, from September to April. I started every application early, weeks in advance, so there was always time to edit, to get feedback, to make it better. That steadiness is the thing my team noticed before I noticed it in myself. It is also the thing that let my writing transform, because you cannot watch your fifteenth essay outclass your first unless you keep showing up for all fourteen in between.

Consistency was never just about volume. Grade 12 gets genuinely hard at points, and I learned it is okay to put scholarships on hold, focus on school, and come back. Staying in the process did not mean grinding without rest. It meant returning, again and again, until the work was done.

A Note to the Next Grade 11 Kid

Time management is the whole game. I came in thinking I had it handled, and the pile humbled me fast. So get a digital calendar. Break the big, overwhelming thing into small, scheduled pieces. Hold yourself accountable, and find a way to stay motivated when no one is watching, because most of this is self-motivation in a quiet room. Once you get past the breakdown, the process is so much easier than the fear of it.

And be kind to yourself inside it. It is okay not to be everything to everyone, and to take the space you need, because this is an overwhelming year. If you are a parent reading this, here is the honest filter. A program like this will not do it for your child. It gives them the tools, the feedback, and the structure, and then it asks them to show up consistently and do the work themselves. If your child will keep returning to the page, week after week, even when it is hard, this is the right fit. It does not carry them. It teaches them how to carry themselves.

Where I Stand Today

It is only the start of April as I write this, and the process is not even finished. There are more scholarships open on my desk, more committees still to hear from. But I already have the thing I was missing back in Grade 11. I have a place at UBC in the exact program I wanted, and the awards have followed: a UBC President's Scholarship of around thirty thousand dollars, and roughly thirty-five hundred more from UVic. More than thirty-three thousand so far, with the cycle still going.

The clueless Grade 11 kid who only knew three words about university turned out to have everything she needed. She just had to find the road, then walk it the same way every single week. The map was never the hard part. Showing up, over and over, until the city in the distance became the place I was standing, was the whole thing.