How Maryam Told Her Story and Earned Her Place at UBC

The hardest part was never the writing. It was the silence after. It was Grade 12 in Surrey, and I would send an application into the world and then hear nothing for weeks, sometimes longer, and when the answer finally came it was not always the one I wanted. I knew where I was trying to go. I wanted a spot at the University of British Columbia, a place to study the things that actually moved me. What I did not have yet was the patience, or the proof, to believe I would get there. Why would they pick me?

I had the grades and the volunteer hours. On paper I looked like a strong applicant. But paper was the problem. I was a list of accomplishments, and a list does not tell anyone who you are. I remember sitting at my desk, motivated one day and flattened the next, wondering whether the version of me that lived inside an application would ever sound like the real one.

The Program That Handed Me the Tools

What I needed was not someone to write my applications for me. I needed someone to show me how to write them well, then trust me to do it. That is what I found with AdmissionPrep. It was never a shortcut. It was a workshop full of resources, structure, and people who had already walked this exact road to schools like UBC.

The thing that changed me first was simply seeing how it was done. I could open past winning essays and study how real students had structured their stories. I could lay an outline beside a blank page and finally understand the shape of what I was building. Having all of that organized and open in front of me, instead of guessing in the dark, was the difference between dreading the work and starting it.

Learning to Tell My Story

Here is the lesson that reshaped everything for me. Most students, when they apply, write out their volunteer work and their achievements and how much they have done. I did that too, at first. But an application built only from a résumé is forgettable, because every strong applicant has a résumé.

So I stopped listing and started telling. I learned to write my narrative instead, the values underneath the activities, the reason I chose this club and not that one, the reason I cared about a particular class. I am South Asian, I am a young woman from Surrey, I have my own reasons for everything I have done. When I let those reasons carry the writing, the applications stopped sounding like a spreadsheet and started sounding like me. That is what a university wants to admit. Not a list. A person.

The Feedback That Made Me Better

I did not get there alone. Every essay I wrote, I could send back for honest feedback, and the replies were exactly the kind I needed. This part is strong. This one could go deeper. Try switching this around. It was real, constructive, specific, never just a pat on the head.

And it compounded. I went back and looked at the very first essay I submitted, then at one of my last, and the difference was almost embarrassing. By the end, even my first drafts were sharper, because I had absorbed the system. You get into a rhythm. You stop fearing the blank page because you finally know how to fill it. That confidence is the thing that carried me into UBC, and it was built one round of feedback at a time.

The Stretch That Almost Stopped Me

If you take one thing from my story, take this: the hardest enemy in an application year is not the work. It is staying motivated when the world goes quiet.

I procrastinated. A lot. I would pour myself into an application, send it off, and then wait, and the waiting wore me down. Some answers were no. Some never came. What pulled me through was the people around me. When the motivation drained out, my mom would sit down next to me and let me talk my ideas out loud until they made sense again. A supportive room, I learned, is not a luxury in this process. It is the engine.

The other thing that saved me was routine. I am not a natural early riser, and getting there took me months. But I set a wake-up time, every single day, weekends included, because the quiet morning was when I did my best and most creative work. Applications do not run on a tidy schedule. One takes an afternoon, the next takes a week. The only thing I could control was showing up at the same time, ready, every day.

The Yes I Was Waiting For

And then the answers I wanted started to arrive. I got into UBC, the place I had been aiming at the whole time. After all the silence, after all the maybes, there was finally a yes from the one school I most wanted to call mine.

The funding came with it, more than I had let myself hope for. The UBC Centennial Scholars Entrance Award worth roughly $80,000. A University of Toronto Academic Excellence Award. A youth service award from my own community in Surrey. More than $88,000 in total. But the dollars, as much as they steadied me, were never the real prize. The real prize was the weight lifting off my shoulders, knowing the money was handled, so I could walk onto campus and just learn.

The Word: Narrative

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

I came in believing my achievements would speak for themselves. They did not. What spoke was the story I learned to tell with them, the through-line of who I am and what I believe. There is a reason behind every grade you earned and every organization you joined, and the moment you learn to surface that reason, your application stops being a metric and becomes a human being. That shift is the whole game.

It changed how I see my future, too. I am going to UBC for the social sciences, because I want to learn about the world and about people. I do not have my exact major locked yet, and I have made peace with that. I want to explore, take new courses, and follow my values rather than a job title. Someone once told me to focus on what I care about, not where I think I should end up. For now that points me toward law and human rights, toward working directly with people. Wherever it lands, the compass is the same.

A Note to the Next Grade 11 Kid

If you are in Grade 11 and staring down this whole thing, do not lead with your trophy case. Write your narrative. Tell people what you value, what you believe, what makes you you, and let your activities prove it instead of replace it. Build a routine you can actually keep, even a small one, and protect the quiet hours when you do your best thinking. And when the silence stretches and the rejections sting, find the people who will sit beside you and remind you why you started.

One more thing I had to teach myself. Before a big test or a daunting application, I learned to stop chasing the grade and tell myself I am only here to do my best, whatever that best is. Grades matter, but what you actually learn matters more, and that mindset is the one nobody can take from you.

And if you are a parent reading this, the honest filter is simple. AdmissionPrep will not write your child's story for them. It hands them the tools, the examples, and the honest feedback, then asks them to do the work. If your child is willing to show up and own it, it will teach them how to carry themselves into rooms like the ones I am about to walk into.

Where I Stand Today

A year ago I was a strong applicant on paper who could not yet say who she was. Today I have my place at UBC, the means to take it, and something steadier than either. I know how to tell my own story, and I trust it.

The metrics were never the point. Behind every grade and every hour of service was a reason, and the moment I learned to say the reason out loud, they finally let me in.