How Kunal Got Into Western's Ivey Business School (and $111,000 Followed)

I was seventeen, sitting at my desk in Brampton, looking at a list of business schools that felt like the whole rest of my life packed into six lines. Ivey at Western sat at the top. I knew where I wanted to end up. I just did not yet know if I was the kind of person who could actually get there. Could I really build the file that walks me into Western, or was I just a kid who liked the idea of it?

I had a feeling and not much of a plan. The path between wanting Western and earning it is the part nobody hands you. What I wanted was simple to say: someone who knew this road and would teach me to walk it, not walk it for me.

The Program I Could Trust

I found AdmissionPrep the least glamorous way possible. An ad on Snapchat, a free consultation, and a quiet thought of I have nothing to lose. My parents and I got on a Zoom and heard about past students who had walked this exact road and come out with offers and scholarships in hand. It was a real decision with a real price tag, and I am glad we made the one we did.

I started in Grade 11, because I wanted the runway. What I signed up for was not someone to write my applications. It was the frameworks, the database, the editors, and the people who had done this before, all there to guide the work while leaving the work to me. That early start is the single best decision I made.

Building Something Real

Here is what I figured out about admissions: the business schools are not counting accolades. They are looking for a person, and the person has to be on the page. I had gotten involved in as many things as I could, and that breadth was the truest version of me. One initiative could never hold it.

So I led. As president of my school's Model UN, we ran conferences that brought around 400 delegates from 25 schools into one room. As president of the Athletic Council, we opened the gym to everyone and once had 365 kids lined up to play basketball at lunch. Sports were personal. When I first came to Canada from Dubai, overweight and carrying an accent, they were how I fit in and outran the bullying. Giving that to other students meant everything. When my applications opened, those were not lines on a list. They were one story, and it was mine.

The Mentor in My Corner

In Grade 11, I did the unglamorous work of learning to write. I applied to almost everything and wrote some genuinely bad first drafts. But I burned through fifteen different editors that year, sending the same piece back four, five, six rounds at a time. One told me to lean harder on impact. Another told me to show my personal role, the part where I actually grew. I took a little from each until the lessons lived in me and not just on the page.

That was the gift hidden inside starting early. By the time the stakes were highest, I was not learning to write an application and writing it at the same time. My editors had already taught me how, and the feedback always came with real directions attached.

The Strategy Nobody Told Me

Grade 12 hit harder than I expected, and the hours I had poured into scholarship essays got swallowed by school. That forced a lesson that reshaped everything. I had walked in believing essays were the only path to money. They were not. So much of what I won came from merit-based entrance scholarships, tied to my supplementary applications and my grades. I had to do my schoolwork anyway, so I raised my own bar. Instead of a passing mark, I went for the highest mark I could earn, and the entrance scholarships followed. The academics were not a tax on the dream. They were its quietest engine.

The Essay That Almost Broke Me

If you take one thing from my story, take this: the hardest question on any application is the one you will be tempted to leave for last. Do not. I learned it the hard way.

The Western National application is the longest in the country, close to 40,000 characters across seven essays. I got my nomination the first day of winter break, with a February deadline, and broke it into 45-minute blocks, one a day. The plan worked for six of the seven. The last was a prompt about Marilynne Robinson and the link between democracy and the public university, not a question you could lift from another application. Every time I sat down, I told myself I still had a month, and I hit a wall of writer's block that grew more frustrating by the day.

Then I did the thing I should have done first. I stopped trying to finish it alone and booked a one-on-one call with an essay advisor. She handed me a graphic organizer and we spent ten minutes at a time on a single sentence, deconstructing it over and over until that intimidating prompt looked like something I could have written in Grade 7. Once I had it in my own words, it stopped being Western's question and started being mine.

The Notifications

I applied to six business programs, five straight commerce and the Waterloo BBA and Math double degree. And the offer I had wanted all along came through: Western, economics for the first two years, with Ivey AEO status to enter the Ivey Business School. I committed. It had been my first choice from the start.

The funding followed. The Western National Scholarship, the President's Entrance Scholarship, worth $50,000. York's President's Entrance Scholarship worth $21,600. Across a range of entrance scholarships, my total came to roughly $111,000. There was a sting inside it too. I was named a Loran Award semi-finalist, top 335 of nearly 6,000 applicants, then cut before the final stage. Falling short that close was hard. But no single scholarship is the be-all, and the Loran essays I wrote early became raw material I reshaped across every application after.

The Word: Discipline

If I had to describe this whole journey in one word, it would be discipline.

Not the loud kind. The quiet kind. Discipline is the 45 minutes a day when it would be easier to be on TikTok. It is sticking to the plan you made when the version of you who made it has left the room. The hardest part of the whole Western application was never the writing. It was holding the line every day, refusing the shortcut, and trusting that a small block of honest work, repeated, beats a panicked all-nighter every time.

That is the change that outlasts admissions. This fall I am heading to London for Western and Ivey, the first time I will make every decision on my own, with no one to discipline me but me. After everything this year taught me, I think I am ready for that.

A Note to the Next Grade 11 Kid

Start in Grade 11. The minute it ends, the money on the table multiplies, and the students who got there early are the ones with the writing reps to use it. Break the big applications into daily blocks, and do not leave the hardest essay for last. And do not wait until you are stuck to ask for help, because the call you put off is usually the one that unlocks everything.

And if you are a parent reading this, here is the honest filter. If your child can hold a plan for weeks without taking the shortcut, and take six rounds of feedback and still do the work themselves, this is the right kind of program for them. It will not carry them. It will teach them how to carry themselves.

Where I Stand Today

Two years ago I was a kid with a feeling and no strategy, wondering if I was really the type who could earn a spot at Western. Today I have the offer, the Ivey path I wanted, and the discipline that got me both. AdmissionPrep did not hand me that. They taught me the habits, then trusted me to keep them.

The scholarships were never the point. They were proof. Proof that you can take something that looks impossibly big, sit down with it for 45 honest minutes, and do that again tomorrow, until one day the thing you were not sure you could do is simply done.