How Mehgan Traded Law for Film and Got Into TMU's Creative School

For most of my life, I was going to be a lawyer. I had said it out loud so many times that it stopped feeling like a choice and started feeling like a fact. Then, in Grade 11, I signed up for a television editing course almost by accident. I sat down at the timeline, started cutting clips together, and felt something I had never felt about the law. What if the future I had been so sure of was not the one I actually wanted?

That question scared me more than any deadline. Changing your mind about who you are going to be is not a small thing when your whole identity is built around the old answer. But once I had felt it, I could not unfeel it. The problem was that I had no idea how to turn a vague new love into a real application, into essays and references and a spot in a program I had barely started dreaming about. I wanted someone who knew this road and would walk it with me.

The Program That Met Me Where I Was

I found AdmissionPrep through an ad on Instagram, of all places. It kept showing up on my feed, and eventually I gave it a real look. What pulled me in was the promise underneath it: real guidance is not about someone handing you the finished essay. It is about teaching you to tell your own story so well that committees feel it, and the work stays truly yours.

That mattered to me, because I was in the middle of reinventing what my story even was. I did not need a babysitter. I needed scaffolding, a team that would push me to dig into what I had actually done and present it like it counted, and keep me moving when I wanted to stop. From the very beginning of the scholarship process in September, that is exactly what I got.

Learning to Tell My Own Story

Here is what nobody tells you about applications: you think you are describing your experiences, but you are not optimizing them. You list a leadership position, write a polite sentence about it, and move on. Then someone shows you that the polite sentence was hiding the whole point.

My advisors made me rewrite, and rewrite again, the way I described what I had done. They made me milk every achievement honestly, put in the real numbers, the hours, the effort I had never bothered to name. I wrote about a company I co-founded with my sisters. I wrote up every leadership position I had held in high school, not as a list but as proof of who I was becoming. They kept pulling me back to one thing: stop describing, and start showing the committees what they actually care about. That skill, putting only the best of your experiences on the page, is the one I carry with me now.

The Push in My Corner

What I loved about AdmissionPrep was that it never let me coast. The notifications kept coming. The reminders kept coming. The editing team was there every time I sat down to write, and the feedback never stopped at "good job." It told me what to fix and why.

That steady push is the only reason I kept going, because the truth is I almost did not. The encouragement was not one big speech. It was a drumbeat: you have done the work, now present it so people can feel it, and we will help you do that. When you are rebuilding your whole sense of where you are headed, you need people who keep handing you the next step instead of letting you spiral. That is what they did.

The Stretch That Almost Stopped Me

If you take one thing from my story, take this: the rejection emails will try to talk you out of it, and you cannot let them.

I applied to a lot of scholarships, and for every one I won, there were so many that came back with the same quiet "not this time." One after another. It is demotivating in a way that creeps up on you, and at some point I just stopped applying. I told myself I would never win these, so why keep bleeding effort into them. All of this during a pandemic, stuck at home, trying to stay level-headed about a future that felt impossibly far away.

So I did the thing that saved me. I journaled it out. What is the actual cost of applying versus not applying? I was at home anyway. Instead of watching La La Land for the tenth time, I could rewrite one essay and submit it. My friends talked me back into it too, and the small local wins started to stack. I went into the AdmissionPrep scholarship application carrying that exact low-expectation mentality, almost certain it would be another rejection. And then it was not.

The Notification That Changed the Math

The one I had braced myself to lose was the one I won. The Toronto Metropolitan University (then Ryerson) President's Entrance Scholarship, awarded to a small handful of students a year depending on which program and which faculty you are entering. I won it for the Communication and Design program, the creative school I wanted more than anything.

It was not automatic. It asked for two letters of reference, an essay about a project I had built, the piece about the company I started with my sisters, and a full account of every leadership position I had held. Between the President's Scholarship and the general entrance awards that came with it, the total came to roughly fifty-six thousand dollars over four years. I was ecstatic. But the number was never really the point. The point was that the scariest application, the one I almost did not send, turned into the one that paid for the future I had only just found the courage to want. No loans. That changes everything.

The Word: Reinvention

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

I came in as a future lawyer and walked out as a film student. I took a television editing course on a whim, fell in love with the work, and went to my parents half-afraid to say it out loud. I told them I did not think I wanted to be a lawyer anymore. I expected pushback. Instead they asked me why I would not pursue the thing I loved. They told me it would be hard to break into, but that you have to do what you actually enjoy, and if you can build a life out of it, that is what matters.

That permission rewired everything. Life is short. Why would I spend it doing something I did not love? Film is the rare place where the work and the joy are the same thing, where you watch the end product and immediately want to make the next one. Reinvention was not just switching programs. It was learning I was allowed to change my mind, do the honest work to back it up, and trust where it led.

A Note to the Next Grade 11 Kid

Keep your head up and apply to as many as you can. Recycle your essays, because once you have built a few strong ones, every new application is just a matter of reshaping what you already have. Let people edit your work, even if it is only your friends, and ask them for encouragement when the rejections pile up. Start local if you need the momentum, since those scholarships are often easier to win and one small yes can carry you a long way.

And when you write, stay true to yourself. It is the uniqueness in your essay that wins it, not the technicality. Committees can feel the difference between someone performing and someone telling the truth. If you are a parent reading this, the honest filter is simple: if your child is willing to do the work themselves, take feedback without flinching, and keep going after a string of no's, this is the right kind of program for them. It will not hand them an identity. It will help them build one of their own.

Where I Stand Today

I am heading to TMU for film, and I am walking in with my mind wide open. Maybe I edit. Maybe I produce, reading scripts and shaping projects from the inside. I do not need to have all of it pinned down yet, because the one thing I am sure of is that I belong in that creative school, and I got there by being honest about who I was becoming.

A year and a half ago I was certain I would be a lawyer. Today I am a film student who paid her own way in by sending the application she almost talked herself out of. You are allowed to become someone new. You just have to do the work to prove it, and then send the essay anyway.