tillersaurus

Hey pals! I'm also in the current first-year class at McGill and creeping on this thread (lol @treaclemineroad way to call us out). Hit me up if you're planning on going to McGill and would be interested in splitting a 2-bedroom in the fall! I'm looking in the St. Henri area because I absolutely love the neighbourhood and it's a decently short commute if you live close to one of the metro stations there.

Seconding Magoosh here! I find that I am much better at learning from people than books, and I found their math videos SO intuitive - they really teach you how to beat the system. Their verbal section videos are also great. Plus, their practice tests are actually slightly harder than the GRE questions will be, so even just getting to the point where you get comfortable with the questions they give you is more helpful than it seems! They don't have a huge amount to teach you for the writing - for that, I'd possibly get into the Princeton online practice test system somehow (my friend let me use his account after buying a princeton study book) as they will grade your essays in practice exams. Using just Magoosh (and the princeton essays when I wanted to simulate the full timed exam) got me a fantastic GRE score in the end!

Anyone going to McGill this fall, message me! I'll add you on Facebook

Oh, and I just got this e-mail from Western: Dear Student,A new offer letter is available for you in the Student center with a revised deadline for acceptance. The original letter indicated that you had five business days to accept your offer or it would expire. You actually have until April 15th 2016 to accept your offer as indicated on the program offer letter. We apologize for any confusion. Kind Regards,The School of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies

They're calling?! I went out drinking last night so I'd still be awake at 1:30 when the website updated, so I need to find a good way to get rid of my awful hangover voice if they're calling. Thank you so much for the heads up, hahaha

For those of you who are on waitlists: I am going to be declining the seats offered to me at Western, Dal and Alberta over the weekend sometime when I'm done editing my honours thesis (which apparently is an infinitely long task). I am so stumped over choosing between McGill and Toronto that it almost physically hurts. Anyone have any words of advice?

Well, now I feel like an idiot for paying the deposit. :/ But to be fair, they gave me absolutely no indication that they would be willing to change the deadline when I asked. I still don't know if McGill is my first choice or second behind Toronto. And I'm trying really hard not to think about it until after I finish writing my GD honours thesis. But it is super hard not to. Not gonna lie, I'm a little excited that you are likely to go to McGill, even though I don't know you at all. More potential classmates! If I go there too then I hope we become good pals.

The Dropbox is working for me!

You can always call and ask them! Or send Vicki and e-mail. They've been really helpful when I dealt with them in the past (I had made a mistake on my application and enclosed a transcript that didn't show that I was enrolled in one of the prerequisites!). It doesn't look to me as though there's a deposit you need to pay by then, although I assume that when/if you accept your seat they might provide you instructions and ask that you pay the deposit at that time.

If you can't get into S-LP, see if you can get into a similar field! If you look at my stats, I have relatively little actual S-LP volunteer time (I only volunteered from last September onwards - about 4 or 5 months at application time! Some other applicants on this site had years in S-LP practices), but I took on ABA Therapy (behavioural therapy for children with ASD) as a part-time job for three full years, and developed enough clinical skills that I think schools didn't mind that I had done mostly observation with S-LPs. I technically had both clinical skills and knowledge of what the job was like, even if I didn't develop them in the same place. Just be inventive, get whatever you can get and play the experience you do have up in your statements and you should be totally fine! Any work with the populations that S-LPs work with would look good for sure (Can you volunteer to do social visits with geriatric patients at a rehab hospital? Can you volunteer for a local feeding group or social skill development group? Could you volunteer with an audiologist for a little while?). If you're really worried about it, ask some speech pathologists if you can do material prep for them. I worked with S-LPs who dealt exclusively with autistic kids, and they needed a basically infinite supply of new visuals for visual schedules and recognition activities! Making new visuals means taking photos, sizing them correctly, lots of cutting and laminating, and attaching velcro. It also does the S-LP a huuuuuge favour since they can focus more on the clinical side of things, and doing those things for them could keep you away from the actual clients (since it might well be hospital policy to not have strangers in therapy sessions) while still getting you hours that would count for your application. Or try e-mailing private practices - since the clinicians there are the business owners, you are saving them precious time and money by offering your help.

7th of April! Alberta's deadline is the same. People will likely hear back again on the 8th, I'd say.

I think they sent it at the last possible second during business hours - I got my e-mail at like 9:30PM NL time - hilariously surprising to get when you're getting ready for bed. Nobody should still be open when I'm getting ready for bed, lol.

I am 99% certain that I'll be turning down my seat at Dalhousie, so hopefully that is a bit of good news to some of you who are on the waitlist!

Dalhousie requires that you finish your degree with at least a 3.3 GPA for the acceptance to still be valid. McGill says there are two steps left: providing a transcript (they don't say anything about what your GPA has to be, so hopefully it is equally low, haha) and providing proof of graduation. Those are the only two that I know, though - I don't know what the other schools would require!

Got an e-mail from Dal! Everyone check! Good luck!

So, McGill Round #1 is likely done now, and Dalhousie might have mailed their letters (lol) already... anyone have any clue when Alberta will start contacting people? My original guess was that it might start tomorrow, but I don't know what their deal has been in past years.

I am veeeery frustrated! I got in touch with Toronto just to see if their notifications of decisions were going to be earlier this year. They basically said "tough luck" (very politely, of course). So I paid the deposit for McGill this evening. I figure, I want to be in McGill if I don't get into UofT, and if I *do* get into UofT then the five hundred won't be a huge deal when I consider how much it is going to cost for the degree as a whole, plus rent, plus ideally an international placement. Now, that may not have been a smart decision - maybe you want to hold out until later and see what happens, in case acceptances come out early for ORPAS (doubtful) or they extend the deadline for the deposit (doubtful). But I haven't fully figured out which program I would prefer, so maybe I actually do want to go to McGill! Who knows. Are you going to go to the prospective students day?

Do we know if Dal spreads their acceptances out over a few days as well? There are only a couple of responses on the results page, but it could be true that not many people are on here.

I didn't get the call until later in the day - probably around 3PM in Montreal - so they might be waiting until later in the day on purpose for whatever reason? Or maybe not and I was just one of the last calls for the day.

My last name starts with T! So it's pretty far down there. They might also be going by other things than name (location, maybe?), who knows

I really did not think it would be until next week! Of COURSE nobody is ready for it today. I answered the phone like "Hi.... Yeah, this is _____, .... and who exactly is it that's calling?" without even thinking, whoops. I tried to be extremely polite and professional for the rest of the call, haha

Just so everyone knows, the deadline for decisions on McGill acceptances is the 31st - not sure that I like that with the ORPAS decision announcement date on the 1st at the earliest.

No, actually! It still says "In Review" - I had to double-check who my references were earlier so that I could thank them profusely, haha

I just got my call! Good luck to everyone who applied there

That's so funny, because I grew up on the east coast (well, NL, which is only a little farther than the east coast) and part of my decision-making process has been trying to get somewhere a little farther away from home than Halifax. My mother is devastated that I am leaning towards Alberta if I get my pick of places. And I was definitely a little harsh on Dal's timeline! They describe their first year as a foundation year, but only five of the courses look like they would mostly cover the same material as courses I've already done - that's getting pretty close to a full term's worth, though, and I know I would find that disheartening if I had to sit through so much of the same information I've covered over the last year or so. I'm willing to bet that the courses would still be at least somewhat different, since they'd be coming at it from the perspective of a practicing S-LP!