How Michaella Almost Skipped University and Ended Up at Waterloo

For most of high school, university was not even a question I was asking. It was the summer before Grade 12 in Steinbach, Manitoba, and while other students were already talking about schools and programs and deadlines, I was somewhere else entirely. I was not planning to go. Not because I could not, but because the whole idea felt like a door meant for other people. Was this even something I was supposed to want?

English is not my first language, and somewhere in the back of my mind I had quietly decided that the application world, with its essays and its grammar and its confident applicants, was not built for someone like me. I had a feeling I might be wrong about that. I just did not have a plan, and I was running out of time to find one.

The Application I Clicked on by Accident

When I finally decided to apply, it was already the end of September. Late, by any measure. I had no idea what the major scholarships were, no sense of what made a strong application, no map at all. So I did the only thing I knew how to do. I started browsing. What does it take to get into a good university? Which programs are worth chasing? I was learning the whole landscape from zero, in real time.

Somewhere in that searching I came across AdmissionPrep and clicked a button that said apply now, honestly thinking it was a form for a single scholarship. It was not. It was the start of a program that would teach me how to do all of this myself. Looking back, that accidental click was one of the luckiest things that happened to me. What I found was not someone to write my applications. It was real guidance, the kind that hands you the tools and the feedback and then trusts you to do the work, so the work stays yours.

Learning to Write in a Language That Wasn't My First

Here is the part I was most afraid of. I liked writing, but my essays were full of grammatical errors and I never quite knew how to structure them. When the language on the page is not the language you grew up in, every paragraph feels like a risk.

So I leaned on the help. My advisors went through my writing with me, not just fixing the grammar but showing me how to build an essay that actually held together. I sent my UBC personal profile back for review again and again before it ever reached the committee. And slowly, draft by draft, something changed. One of the team members later told me she remembered going over the final stages of that personal profile and being struck by how much more powerful my writing had become. I felt it too. The technical difficulties that had once made me want to quit had become the thing I was proudest of fighting through.

The Voice in My Head That Kept Doubting

The harder battle was not the grammar. It was the doubt. I am the kind of person who second-guesses herself constantly, and an application season is a long time to spend arguing with that voice. There were so many nights I told myself one application was only worth so much, that maybe this was not for me after all.

What kept me going were the modules. They were not only about how to apply. They talked about how to stay motivated and how to keep moving when you doubt yourself. I think most students struggle with exactly this and never say it out loud. The program gave me permission to name it, and tools to push through it. If you stop following up on your applications, there is no success waiting on the other side. The only way out was to keep going, one honest hour at a time.

The Planner That Held My Whole Life

I am not naturally an organized person, and I was juggling a lot. Work, school, the community projects I cared about, and now a stack of applications I had started far too late. It should not have fit. For a while it did not.

Then, on one of the mentorship calls, an advisor named Kanesha talked about how she kept a planner with every application written down in it. So I started doing the same thing. I wrote it all down, broke it into pieces, and made a schedule I could actually follow. That one habit is how everything got done. Even with everything else pulling at me, I found the time, because for the first time I could see where the time was. Being strategic with my deadlines was the difference between drowning and finishing.

The Acceptance, and the Choice I Didn't Expect

Then the answer came. I got into UBC. After almost not applying at all, after months of doubting whether I belonged in this process, a school I would have been thrilled to attend said yes. I could have stopped there happy.

But somewhere along the way my plan had quietly shifted. I had first set my sights on Environment and Business, drawn to the place where caring for the planet meets the practical work of building things. As I kept searching, I found that the University of Waterloo offered International Development Studies, and the more I read about it the more it felt like the thing I had actually been looking for. Then Waterloo offered me a scholarship tied to that exact field, and the choice made itself. I turned down UBC and chose Waterloo, not for the bigger name, but for the program that fit the person I was becoming.

The Word: Redirection

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

Every part of it was a turn I did not see coming. I was redirected toward university when I had written it off. I was redirected from Environment and Business to International Development once I understood what I actually cared about. I was redirected away from the school I first assumed I would attend toward the one with the right program for me. Even my own doubt got redirected, from a reason to quit into proof of how far I had come. Around $13,000 in scholarships followed, an entrance award and one more from my school near the end. But the real reward was never the money. It was getting to choose my next four years around what I want to do with my life, which is to work with charity organizations and build something real inside the communities I come from.

A Note to the Next Grade 11 Kid

My biggest advice, aside from actually starting, is to make a schedule and write it down. Get organized, even if organization is not in your nature, especially if it is not. Put every deadline somewhere you can see it. That one change carried me through a season I almost did not enter, with a head start I did not have. And do not let a late start, or a second language, or the voice that says this is not for you, decide the question before you do.

And if you are a parent reading this, here is the honest filter. If your child can take real feedback without flinching, sit with their own writing through round after round, and keep showing up even while doubting themselves, this is the right kind of program for them. It will not write the story for them. It will teach them to write it in their own voice.

Where I Stand Today

I have not figured out the whole rest of my life. What I have figured out is that I was never as far behind as I believed. This fall I am starting at the University of Waterloo, in a program I chose on purpose, in a field I am genuinely excited to give my years to. AdmissionPrep did not hand me that. They taught me how to find it and trust it.

A year ago I was not even going to apply. Today I am holding an offer I almost talked myself out of earning. The path was never a straight line, and it did not need to be. Sometimes the road that finds you is the one you were never planning to take.