Waitlist Party 2020/2021

[JustSayian26]

Welp..... High chances of another year of disappointment. From my experience, waitlist people will most likely get regrets. Not keeping my hopes high at all. 

Edit: Just added a poll as well!

[teachdoc]

Same, not sure how to feel rn. Was waitlisted before and rejected end of June :/

[mjb11]

WL today; WL last year as well (IP) and rejected end of June - hopefully a few of us with multiple apps/interviews can get in this yr

[JustSayian26]

Last year only 7 IP applicants rejected their offer and 30 OOP. Anywhere form 20-27 OOP applicants are enrolled each year. This means that around 10-17 IP applicants probably will get a seat. 

[Med&Coffee]

Are there two separate OOP and IP waitlists? 

[ninjabro]

2nd year waitlisted. What was your guys first choice? 

 

 

[JustSayian26]

11 minutes ago, Med&Coffee said:

Are there two separate OOP and IP waitlists? 

I would assume so because there needs to be a certain number of OOP students in every class.

[teachdoc]

1 minute ago, JustSayian26 said:

I would assume so because there needs to be a certain number of OOP students in every class.

My understanding was there is only one waitlist but OOP tend to rank higher on it due to higher stats. The max OOP students UBC can have is 29 (10% of the class) and if you look at the stats for the last 3 years, the numbers for OOP have been 27, 22 and 20, which makes me think that some of the OOP spots go to IP from the waitlist. 

[frenchpress]

3 hours ago, teachdoc said:

My understanding was there is only one waitlist but OOP tend to rank higher on it due to higher stats. The max OOP students UBC can have is 29 (10% of the class) and if you look at the stats for the last 3 years, the numbers for OOP have been 27, 22 and 20, which makes me think that some of the OOP spots go to IP from the waitlist. 

This is correct based on my understanding as well. One list of students, admitted in order by ranking on the list as spots become available. So if an OOP rejects their offer, it could go to an IP or an OOP student if they’re next on the list. But once the maximum number of OOP accept their offers, then it’s IP only (essentially any remaining OOP would get skipped).

[ShadesofCyan]

Just wanna give some love and support to all the people on the waitlist this year. I have been rejected, waitlisted, and accepted to UBC and I really feel for you. Being on the waitlist was very hard on my mental health and I know many find it very challenging. Take care of yourself! Feel free to message me if you want to chat. GOOD LUCK!

[Cannot_hurt]

I’m here for the party. This is going to be tough! I was really hoping that today I could start planning what the next year would look like. 
 

Do any of you know how many people are normally on the waitlist?

[Hulu]

Here as well :/

[neurophile]

Here for it! OOP 

[ninjabro]

Looool. yea like 1 or 2 people from this thread are gonna get in after wait list

 

would have preferred vancouver due to some personal reasons and since I wanna be with fam, but ill probably drop so +1 to you guys

 

gl folks

 

[premedpre]

Here for the party as well (IP) ! Hope some of us will get in 

[JustSayian26]

I added a poll so we can gauge how many people are waitlisted!

[4everwaitlist]

Here to join this group of wonderful people. Just want to say the lack of transparency  by UBC re: waitlist and frankly the entire application process is quite disheartening. I'm sure we would all want to know our rank on the waitlist so that we can make informed decisions about our future plans. Can someone with a wrinkled brain please explain to me UBC's rationale? 

"Unfortunately, we cannot tell you exactly where you are placed on the waitlist [why...?] We regret any uncertainty this may cause." 

I recently graduated so I've got a lot of time. Fellow waitlisters, I will try my best to get you as much information as possible. We deserve to be treated with respect, dignity and the common decency to be informed about matters that concern our future. 

Here is some information that UBC does not tell you but will be useful! It was obtained from (AFMC)the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada (true name, I did not make this up). They provide information on applicant statistics for Canadian medical schools including UBC. Looking at these numbers carefully, and through mathematical wizardry, we are able to deduce that UBC makes approximately ~326 offers to fill their class size of approximately 288. This number is deduced from [Total Applicants] - [Not offered]= Total Offered. It changes from year to year but the average for the past 5 years has been 326. 

From these numbers, we can also deduce the average amount of waitlist candidates that are made offers by UBC.   [average total offers]- [class size] = 326-288 = ~38. waitlisters! As you can imagine, there can be variation e.g. the past 5 years, the number of accepted applicants from waitlist have been: 41, 27, 43, 45, and 41. These numbers can easily be deduced from tallying up candidates that were made offers but either declined for other schools or deferred. 

 

The question then becomes, how many applicants does UBC select into their alternative candidates or waitlisted pool??? Why the secrecy? As you can imagine, the number of individuals that decline offers changes from year to year so UBC does not have a perfect formula for the exact number of candidates to include their pool to perfectly counterbalance those that decline offers. So they have to gamble and they can only gamble in one direction. In other words, UBC must have enough waitlisted applicants so that they can fill their class size. This means they can't waitlist 30 individuals because on average they have ~40 individuals declining their offer. So why not waitlist 40? Hmmm? what if that year, 41 applicants decline their offer? Well, this would mean that the class size would not be 288 because the number of declined offers was not perfectly balanced by the waitlist offers. The class size would therefore be 287 instead of 288. Does this happen? Turns out, it happens more often than you think. In the past 5 years, UBC had 1 year where they perfectly filled their class size. The other 4 years, they had class sizes of -1, -2, and even -4. The significance of this is that UBC is failing to properly balance declined offers of admissions with waitlist offers. Why would this happen? One possibility is that they are exhausting the waitlists but I highly doubt this is the case.  There are usually several applicants every year that are strung along for the entire duration of the application cycle up to and even past the first day of classes. It doesn't explain why  the last 4/5 years the class was undersized (i.e. less than 288). 

 

The first important question is: what is the size of the waitlist pool? To address this question, we need to acknowledge the importance of voting.  I'm embarrassed to say that I was a longtime lurker but I registered for the first time and voted today! Of course we don't know how many applicants are actually using this forum. My guess, the answer is somewhere in between 40- 412 (the upper limit is from total # interviewed -total initial offers or 700-288). Given that UBC actually does send post-interview rejections and does not waitlist every interviewed candidate, the upper limit is certainly not 412. Without knowing how many applicants are rejected post-interview, it is hard to arrive at the waitlist pool size. My educated guess is that UBC hedges their bet 1.5-2x on the waitlist pool, meaning that if they need approximately 40 applicants from the waitlist to fill the class size, UBC would have a ranked pool of 60-80 applicants.  

 

If I was on the adcom, I would keep it stupid simple (KISS) and rank the  700 post-interviewed applicants and take the top 50% as the accept+waitlist population (350 pool). This top 50% would be composed of 288 initial offers + 62 waitlist pool. The good news with my KISS hypothesis is that there is a greater than 50% chance you will be accepted from the waitlist! That is not trivial!!! If you gave me a revolver with 3 in the chamber, and told me to pull the trigger, I would say to you, "No Sir! Not today! ). So don't lost hope, your journey is not over. If you are the poor soul that will be strung along by UBC until late August only to be told, "We have notified all remaining applicants on the waitlist and would like to offer special congratulations to them for making it so far in the application process",  You absolutely have the right to say "F#3K you UBC! I'm a human being and a future doctor that deserves to be treated with dignity, respect, and transparency."  

Anyways, thank you for reading my DD and I wish you all the best as we continue to wait. Life is a journey, not a destination so enjoy every moment. If you enjoy conspiracies about waitlists/rankings/etc. share your thoughts! 

[JustSayian26]

35 minutes ago, 4everwaitlist said:

The class size would therefore be 287 instead of 288. Does this happen? Turns out, it happens more often than you think. In the past 5 years, UBC had 1 year where they perfectly filled their class size. The other 4 years, they had class sizes of -1, -2, and even -4. The significance of this is that UBC is failing to properly balance declined offers of admissions with waitlist offers.

First of all, WOW amazing post!!! I am just confused and astonished about one thing. How in the F#3K does UBC not fill 288 spots every year. This make me feel disgusted that every year there could (NO SHOULD) have been 1-4 people on the waitlist that get accepted!!!!!!! This makes me feel even more pain for the people on the waitlist that get stringed along upto the very end just to be told that they did not get accepted even though they have at least 1 more spot! This kind of doesn't add up. If this is true, I am at a loss of words  .

Another question that I have is how are candidates that differed factored into the equation? Do they send out less offers to account for a total class size of 288? Does it not matter and they send out 288 offers anyway?

[4everwaitlist]

That continues to puzzle me as well. I dug a bit deeper into the AFMC publication. Apparently, the statistics collected  from last year by the AFMC  was conducted on February 2021 (right around the time applicants were being interviewed for this cycle). So it is a bit perplexing why UBC had a class size of 287 as of this date. The simple answer is that when it was all said and done,  UBC mismanaged their waitlists and left a deserving applicant on the list when there was room available in the class. 

Your question about the deferred applicants is also a mystery to me. My immediate thought is that UBC would deduct these applicants from the 288 class size to balance the equation. If anyone has experience with deferring and how that affects class size, please educate us! 

 "All statistical data come from an annual survey conducted by the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada (AFMC). Individual faculty information is provided by each faculty of medicine as of February 2021 and, therefore, is subject to change."

[zoxy]

I don't want to dampen the mood but the AFMC data doesn't differentiate between IP and OOP applicants who reject their offers. If you look at UBC's data, OOP applicants are much more likely to decline their offer than IP candidates. Only 7 IP declined their spot last year and only 12 in 2019(which was not impacted by COVID).

Also the AFMC data is fine. UBC did not leave and empty spot and did not mismanage their wait list. The spot was give to someone who deferred their offer the previous year. If you add the acceptances each year to the the number of deferred applicants the previous year, you get to 288 or close to it as some folks might defer for more than a year. For example, the only year where they accepted the full 288 was 2018/19 where they had no deferrals the previous year. I personally know someone who deferred for two years even though technically it's not allowed.

Not trying to be a Debbie downer but want all the facts to be out there.

Also the AFMC data is not 100 percent accurate. Just under the portion that was screenshoted, the AFMC doc has the rate of success for BC applicants at 10.1 percent, for non BC Canadians it's 0 percent, but for both groups combined it is 12.8 percent. Clearly that doesn't make sense.

https://med-fom-ugrad.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2021/03/Statistics-2019-2020-MED2024-Website-1.pdf

https://www.afmc.ca/sites/default/files/pdf/2021_admission-requirements_EN.pdf

[JohnGrisham]

1 hour ago, 4everwaitlist said:

That continues to puzzle me as well. I dug a bit deeper into the AFMC publication. Apparently, the statistics collected  from last year by the AFMC  was conducted on February 2021 (right around the time applicants were being interviewed for this cycle). So it is a bit perplexing why UBC had a class size of 287 as of this date. The simple answer is that when it was all said and done,  UBC mismanaged their waitlists and left a deserving applicant on the list when there was room available in the class. 

Your question about the deferred applicants is also a mystery to me. My immediate thought is that UBC would deduct these applicants from the 288 class size to balance the equation. If anyone has experience with deferring and how that affects class size, please educate us! 

 "All statistical data come from an annual survey conducted by the Association of Faculties of Medicine of Canada (AFMC). Individual faculty information is provided by each faculty of medicine as of February 2021 and, therefore, is subject to change."

No one is "mismanaging their waitlist" ; there is more nuance to application processes, and simple facts that students defer or take leave of absences and join future classes - thus the numbers are not telling a full picture.

[frenchpress]

17 minutes ago, zoxy said:

Also the AFMC data is fine. UBC did not leave and empty spot and did not mismanage their wait list. The spot was give to someone who deferred their offer the previous year. If you add the acceptances each year to the the number of deferred applicants the previous year, you get to 288 pr close to it as some folks might defer for more than a year. For example, the only year where the accepted the full 288 was 2018/19 where they had no deferrals the previous year. I personally know someone who deferred for two years even though technically it's not allowed.

Yes, agree that this is the case. And in addition to deferrals, I suspect the remaining spots some years are for 1st year students who are required to repeated year 1, of which there’s on average 0-2.

[razzmatazz]

Interesting developments. I was waitlisted last year and received regrets this year and would definitely appreciate more insights as to how this whole process works. I know that in certain nursing programs, wait lists carry over from year to year so not sure why UBC couldn’t just do something like that?

[4everwaitlist]

1 hour ago, JohnGrisham said:

No one is "mismanaging their waitlist" ; there is more nuance to application processes, and simple facts that students defer or take leave of absences and join future classes - thus the numbers are not telling a full picture.

Agreed, mismanaging is not the right word. Nevertheless, a lack of transparency in the nuances of the admissions process definitely leaves a sour taste for many applicants.  It also facilitates mistrust and loss of confidence in the integrity of the process. If enough applicants voice their concerns, UBC and other schools will have to make the process more transparent and less uncertain for applicants.  It's a clear win-win scenario . 

[JohnGrisham]

6 minutes ago, 4everwaitlist said:

Agreed, mismanaging is not the right word. Nevertheless, a lack of transparency in the nuances of the admissions process definitely leaves a sour taste for many applicants.  It also facilitates mistrust and loss of confidence in the integrity of the process. If enough applicants voice their concerns, UBC and other schools will have to make the process more transparent and less uncertain for applicants.  It's a clear win-win scenario . 

What is the "win" in knowing any of this minutiae information? It doesn't affect whether you get into medical school or not. All it does is create extra administrative work for dissemination for no clearly helpful reason.