I no longer meet the requirements of my admission offer.... but my program director is telling me to show up in september anyway.

[lavplur]

I am aware that this is a little bit of an unusual situation.

 I got accepted into a fully funded masters program in a different province for 2020 but deferred to 2021. I anticipated difficulties with completing my honours thesis when the pandemic hit and I also just didn't want to move to a huge city in my country in the midst of the beginning of the pandemic. I basically decided in the last year to drop my honours thesis. My supervisor retired, my method of recruitment was advertising on posters at universities and events which all closed in the pandemic, and I no longer had the funds to keep paying for the thesis credits out of my pocket. It has just become an entire mess.

Before deciding to decline my offer of admission to the masters, I decided to email the program director about my situation. I am coming in with a high gpa, years of experience in the field, a strong writing sample, strong letters of recommendation from my current program director/established academics, but the only thing I would not have is my honours thesis. The director of the program sent me an email basically saying that I could proceed with registering and then "make an argument when the time comes". In her words, "if you want to do the degree, hang onto your spot, and we deal with the questions about your qualifications as they arrive. People know that COVID made everything messy". She said that the faculty of graduate studies usually checks in about qualifications (to see if the conditions in which you were accepted were met) in October, which is a month after classes start.

I do want to do this program and I do not mind waiting until next year to apply again without the thesis on my application, but I would 100% like to try to go this year if I could. Do you all think this might be good advice? Have you heard of this kind of situation? Do you think the faculty of graduate studies would kick me out once I got there for this? I'm not sure if I should attempt to move to another province if there is a chance to be kicked out in October. On the other hand, the program director is implying that there shouldn't be too big of a problem.