How Lenny Traded Fog for Clarity, a Schulich Leader Scholarship & a Spot at Western

I can still hear the question I never said out loud. It was the summer after Grade 10, and I was sitting at my desk in New Westminster, staring down a future I wanted badly and had no map for. The business and computer science programs I dreamed about felt like lights on the far side of a fog. I could see them. I just could not see the path. What do I actually want, and how on earth do I get there?

I didn't have a plan yet. I had a feeling, and a conviction I had carried my whole life: if you set your mind to something and put in real effort, more often than not it finds its way back to you. The process still scared me, the deadlines and the essays and the horror stories from friends a year ahead. What I wanted was simple to say and hard to find: someone in my corner who knew the road and would guide me down it, not walk it for me.

The Program I Could Trust

Then I found a video by Jason Yee, and it put words to the thing I had been looking for. Real guidance, he said, is not about handing a student the answers. It is about teaching them to find the answers themselves, so the work is truly theirs and the growth comes with it. Give a student the tools, the frameworks, and honest feedback, then trust them to do the work. That was exactly the kind of program I had hoped existed.

So in the summer of Grade 10, I started with AdmissionPrep. Not a babysitter. A scaffolding. The resources, the frameworks, and the people who had done this before, all there to guide the work while leaving the work to me. Every few months I would sit down with an advisor and we would talk through plans, goals, and the next move. That rhythm carried me through Grade 11 and into Grade 12.

Building Something Real

Here is what nobody tells you about Canadian admissions: grades and activities open the door, but the story is what walks you through it. Admissions officers are not counting accolades. They are looking for someone authentic who actually serves the people around them.

So I stopped collecting and started building. I helped run a peer tutoring program at my school. I led a nonprofit that handed out more than 2,800 sandwiches to people in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. I brought AI workshops to my local library and pitched them all the way up to city council. None of it was for a checkbox. And in every consultation, my advisors kept pushing me to make each project deeper and more useful, not longer on a list. By the time applications opened, those scattered activities had become one thread, and the thread was mine.

The Mentor in My Corner

My advisor, Jasmine Chen, was the reason deadlines never swallowed me. She was around every corner, reminding me of the next due date whether I had clocked it or not. If you know how I am wired, you know why that mattered. I am the kind of person who can get so locked into one thing that everything behind it quietly slips. In an application year, that is the difference between an offer and a missed window.

What surprised me most was the encouragement. There was no single magic speech. It was the steady drumbeat at the end of every session: you have the accomplishments, Lenny. You just need to present them so people can feel them, and we will help you do that. Many of these advisors were second and third year university students who had walked this exact road, so the affirmation always came with real directions attached.

The Two Weeks That Almost Broke Me

If you take one thing from my story, take this: make the most of the first three months of Grade 12. Lock in. Get your essays done. Because life does not check your calendar before it throws something at you.

In November, my family had to fly overseas for an emergency visa renewal. Two weeks. It landed on the exact stretch when the major national scholarship essays were due, and those applications hold far more questions than they let on from the outside. I thought I had two free weeks. Instead I was writing essays overnight, pulling the kind of all-nighters I had spent years teaching myself to avoid. For a while I was certain I would not make it.

Then something clicked. You have a lot more time than you think you do, once you actually make space, sit still, and budget it honestly. I got the essays done. I ran them through round after round of feedback with my advisors, my teachers, my friends and family, and the essay team. And I came out the other side.

The Notifications

Acceptance season does not feel real. I had applied to four schools: UBC Sauder, Queen's, the University of Toronto, and Western. One by one, they all said yes. Every single one.

The funding followed. A Schulich Leader Scholarship worth $100,000. A Chancellor's Scholarship from Queen's worth roughly $70,000. More than $170,000 in awards by the end of the cycle. But the number that mattered most was never a dollar figure. It was optionality. I got to choose my next four years based on where I wanted to be, not where I could afford to land. Most students never get to stress over a problem that good, and I promise I will not take it for granted.

The Word: Clarity

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

I came in without a real picture of what I wanted to become. Then, in Grade 11, an advisor named Ashley sat me down and asked the question I had been avoiding: Lenny, you have done a lot, but what do you actually want to be? I said I didn't know. So she stayed with it. She walked me through a personality test and a career assessment, and for the first time the fog thinned out. I could see ten and twenty years ahead. I want to work in consultancy, in organizational management and resource allocation, helping organizations run better than I found them.

That was clarity about my future. But it showed up everywhere else too: clarity about deadlines, about how to actually write an application, about which courses to take. I even got advice from a third year at Western's Ivey Business School on building a course load that protects your GPA while deepening what you learn. This fall I am heading to Western for a dual degree in Computer Science and Business, and it was my first choice all along.

A Note to the Next Grade 11 Kid

You cannot brute force this. I learned that the hard way. Marcus Aurelius wrote that all you really have is the present moment, so give the moment in front of you your full attention, then let it go. Block your time. Track your deadlines in something like Notion. Share your goals with people who will hold you to them. Reserve time at the end of every week to step back and reflect. And protect your mental health like the asset it is, because burnout costs more than any deadline ever will.

And if you are a parent reading this, here is the honest filter. If your child can sit down and grind for three hours before a math test, if they can take feedback without flinching and 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

I have not figured out the rest of my life. What I have figured out is belief. I belong in those lecture halls. I belong in rooms I have not walked into yet. AdmissionPrep did not hand me that belief. They helped me find it, sharpen it, and trust it.

Two years ago I was a kid with a feeling and no plan. Today I have the plan, the offer, and the clarity to use both. The fog never lifts on its own. You walk through it, one honest step at a time, until one day you look up and realize you can finally see.