List of activities and verifiers & GPA

[Guest Jase133]

I've two questions. Perhaps Ian or other persons who are heavily involved in the admissions process and know what's going on can answer these questions:

 

1) To what extent do they verify the list of activities? I'm afraid that the people I've put on there may not remember me. Do they verify everything? What happens if something cannot be verified? Will this jeopardize my chances of admissions?

 

2) The admissions persons mentioned that upon conditional acceptance, you must maintain a satisfactory GPA. In addition, she added that it must be somewhat similar to your previous year's. What is the limit to this? In previous years, I've done quite well. This year, however, I am not doing as well as previous year's. I am still maintaining "A" average, however, just not as high. How will this factor in?

 

Thanks

[Guest Ian Wong]

Jase,

 

My general thoughts are that UBC doesn't have the manpower to verify everything. If they verify anything, it will likely take place during the interviews, when you will be asked to describe and comment upon your experiences. I really wouldn't worry about getting tracked down. Jase, the following comments are not directed at you, but they need to be said to everybody.

 

With that said, many of you out there will realise that you could falsify information in an attempt to "beef up" your application. Let me say right now that it probably isn't worth your time. The reason is that most of the questions that come up in the interview are the fairly major life experiences that you've had. This could include:

 

-significant travelling

-major sporting endeavours

-international volunteering

-major research (eg. publications, grad degrees)

-life changing experiences

 

These are the kind of things that are most difficult to lie about, while still sounding sincere. As a result, it's probably not worth lying, and stating on your application that you won the 1999 Nobel Prize in Medicine. You'll probably get busted.

 

On the other hand, there's all the little fine details that you could lie about. This includes stuff like:

 

-hospital volunteering

-summer research

-intramural sports

-university clubs

 

UBC Med is unlikely to verify things like this. On the other hand, since every applicant and his/her dog will have written about some of the above, there really isn't any benefit gained as far as "standing out from the pack" by lying about the minor details.

 

Therefore, as you can see, lying on the application really isn't that beneficial. You'll get busted if you falsify the big stuff, and you won't gain any advantage if you embellish the little stuff, and all the while, you run the risk of getting busted, and essentially kissing goodbye any chance of ever getting into UBC Med. According to Dr. Bates, people are kicked out each year after getting caught lying.

 

Therefore, don't put any additional stuff on your application that you didn't really do. It isn't worth it.

 

As to your second question, as long as you don't drop abysmally, you are unlikely to be replaced. That rule was written in to prevent people from, upon receiving their acceptance letter, and recovering from their post-acceptance hangover, from completely blowing off school and going on a 5-month pre-med school vacation.

 

For you, I think that going to something like a C average would probably be the point at which you'd start to risk your acceptance letter. In everyday admissions life, I don't think they make use of this rule very often, if at all.

 

Ian

UBC, MS2