How Lauren Got Into Western Medical Sciences and Nearly Quit the Essay That Paid For It

I almost gave up the day before the deadline. It was April, my desk in Vancouver buried under tabs and half-finished drafts, and I was staring at the longest application I had ever attempted. I had wanted to be a doctor for as long as I could remember. What I did not have was a map for how a girl from British Columbia actually gets from a Grade 12 bedroom to medical school. The dream was loud. The plan was silent. Is this even worth my time?

I had carried that want my whole life, the pull toward medicine, toward helping people on a scale bigger than myself. But wanting something does not tell you which program to apply to, or how to write an essay that makes a stranger believe in you. When I first started, it was overwhelming. So much information, almost no way to navigate it. I knew where I wanted to end up. I had no idea how to begin.

The Program That Made Me Own It

What I needed was not someone to do it for me. I needed someone who had walked the road and would hand me the map without walking it in my place. I wanted the work to be mine, because if I was going to build a life in medicine, the habits had to start now.

So I joined AdmissionPrep. From the beginning it was unlike anything in high school. School is structured: you do your math problems, you write the essay your teacher assigns. This was completely self-motivated, and at first that terrified me. The program gave me the scaffolding I was missing, people who had done this before and frameworks I could lean on while the work stayed in my hands. I was suddenly surrounded by other students chasing the same thing, and that mattered more than I expected.

Choosing the Program, Not Just the School

Here is the decision that shaped everything: I chose Western University, and inside Western I chose Medical Sciences. It was the program I loved, the one built for exactly the path I wanted, and it happened to come with the biggest offer of funding I received. That alignment was not luck. It was the product of months of asking the right questions instead of just chasing prestige.

Because I knew where I was headed, I could choose with intention. Medical Sciences first, then medical school, then a master's in public health, with a long-term goal of international health, splitting my future between hospitals here and care overseas. Picking a program is so much easier when you can see the ten-year version of yourself standing at the end of it. AdmissionPrep helped me find her, and then helped me build backward from her.

The Mentors Who Had Walked It First

The part I underestimated was how much it would help to not feel alone. The mentors in the program were second and third year students who had been exactly where I was, doubting themselves at the same desk, staring down the same deadlines. They had come out the other side, and now they could look back and tell me what actually mattered.

They taught me how to learn from a mistake instead of drowning in it. When I missed an opportunity or knew I had not put my best in, they helped me see the next one already coming, and reminded me there was a team behind me that wanted me to do my best. It was comforting to know that what I felt was not a flaw in me. Students in Ontario, in Alberta, everywhere, were feeling it too. We were all walking the same fog at the same time.

The Essay That Almost Beat Me

If you take one thing from my story, take this. The Western National Scholarship essay was the hardest thing I wrote all year, and I nearly quit it the day before it was due.

It ran three weeks long. Three weeks. When I first opened it I thought, how am I supposed to write this? I did not know what to put for half the questions or where to even start looking. And by the end, exhausted and unsure, the doubt got loud. Do I even do this? Is it worth my time? Who is actually going to win this anyway? I had poured in so much effort already and had nothing to show for it yet, and every fiber of me wanted to close the tab and walk away.

Then I said something to myself that I keep coming back to. I need to do this for me. Even if I might not get it, I need to at least put my application out there, know I did my best, and see where it goes. So I stayed. I pushed through the last questions, ran my drafts past the people in my corner, and submitted. I would have given anything in that moment to be done. I am so glad I did not give myself the no.

When the Yeses Finally Came

Here is the part nobody warns you about: the waiting is long, and for a while it only delivers rejection. I felt so much failure before anything went right. You apply and apply, you keep going, and the silence makes you feel like none of it counted.

Then it broke. I won the Western National Scholarship, the very essay I had nearly abandoned. Awards kept arriving until the total reached close to $80,000. But the dollars were never really the prize. The prize was the proof that the work was worth it, that I had earned my place in a program I genuinely loved, and that I would get to chase medicine without the weight of cost deciding it for me. The freedom to choose my own next four years, that was the win.

The Word: Perseverance

If I had to sum up this whole journey in one word, it would be perseverance.

Anyone who knows me well knows I have this inability to give up. That stubbornness was the single biggest factor in everything that worked out. It sounds cliche to say "do not give up," but it is not cliche when you are living the rejection, when you have put in all the time and effort and have nothing back yet. Perseverance is what you do in that exact gap, when no result has arrived and you have to keep going anyway on nothing but trust.

That is the deeper thing the process gave me, bigger than any acceptance. I learned to believe in myself when the noise told me not to, and that the students who keep going when they want to stop are the ones who end up understanding why they had to go through it at all. I will carry that into medical school, into public health, into every long road still ahead.

A Note to the Next Grade 11 Kid

I was the student watching these videos and thinking everyone else had it figured out. They did not. Every single one of them sat where you are sitting, certain they were the only one lost. That feeling is normal. It is not a sign you are doing it wrong.

So trust the process, and keep going. You are going to hear a lot of noes. You are going to want to give up. When that day comes, be able to tell yourself, nope, I am going to do this for me, and I am going to trust it works out. Put your application out there even when you are convinced you will not win. The student who can keep believing when no one else does is the student who gets where they are trying to go. And if you are a parent reading this, the right program will not carry your child. It will teach them to carry themselves, which is the only thing that holds up once the real work begins.

Where I Stand Today

I have not become a doctor yet. What I have become is someone who knows she can outlast the hard part. I belong in that Medical Sciences lecture hall. I belong on the long road to medicine and public health that is still mostly ahead of me. AdmissionPrep did not hand me that belief. They stood beside me while I built it.

A year ago I was a student with a dream and no map, one tab away from quitting an essay that ended up paying for my future. Today I have the offer, the program I love, and the proof of what I am made of. The yeses never come on the day you need them. They come on the day after you decide to keep going anyway.