What really goes on in Undergraduate Admissions? How many students apply to UBC? How many documents are received and processed? What milestones do we go through? Read on and discover a whole new world.

December: We receive our first big wave of applicants the week leading up to midnight of December the 1st. This is the deadline for those who wish to be considered for first round offers of admission and various entrance scholarships. This year, however, as the date fell on a Saturday, the deadline was extended to Monday the 3rd. Once past this wave, we enter quieter waters, lulling us to and past the holidays where we are unceremoniously thrown into the deep end with thousands of backlogged email inquiries from students and stacks of documents as high as the sky waiting for us on our return. Just in time for the second wave.

The second wave comes during the application deadline of January 15th. From that point on we are all engaged in a constant race between getting files to the evaluation stage and evaluating.

As of February 15, we have 45,226 applicants. And this is not the final number! Many programs are still open for applications.

While it’s difficult to say exactly how many applications are prepped and ready for evaluation, as different types of students are coded differently, we can confirm that we have sent out 4,506 offers of admission for students’ first choice programs. And this is in part thanks to our wonderful team of readers as all high school students are required to submit personal profiles for their application. So far, we have had over 38,000 reads of personal profiles.

February 15 is also a great wave. This date is the deadline for students to submit documentation that they meet UBC’s English Language Admission Standard. As English is the primary language of instruction, all prospective students are required to demonstrate a minimum level of English before they’re admitted.

Once the documents have been received and scanned in the mail room, all teams then link each one to students’ files and update their application accordingly. Although seemingly simple, this is a surprisingly daunting task. The sheer volume of the documents received and processed is coupled with the complexity of each transcript and the detail to which we examine them. Once we ensure that we have all we need, we make every effort to get the applications to the evaluation stage.

In between these big waves are the constant ebbs and flows of student inquiries. At our busiest times, we have over 3,400 emails and inquiries waiting for our attention both from domestic and international applicants.

To put it simply, there is no dull day in undergraduate admissions.