Essay And Top 3 Ecs Verifiers?

[House,M.D]

U of T says   " In some cases, the Admissions Office may wish to verify additional information about activities that are described in either the brief personal essays or the ABS. Therefore, you must provide the name, address and phone number of at least one contact person (verifier) for each activity that you consider to be of major importance. The Admissions Office may perform random checks of applicants’ verifiers. Please notify your verifiers in case they are contacted by the Admissions Office."

 

I am slightly confused about why and how we are supposed to include verifiers in our essays and top 3 ecs.

 

Would this example be correct. Say I list that I volunteer at a soup kitchen on my omsas sketch, and the verifier is 3. If I use my soup kitchen experience as a top 3 ABS item, do I write in the body of my 250 words that same verifier number or do I write the number of the activity as it appears on my omsas app? . It just seems kind of redundant to list the verifier again, I mean if I select an ABS item as my top 3, I will already have the verifier info on the omsas app, or does U of T want it again. 

 

Any help is appreciated, the final week before I submit is stressing me out

[Pepedo]

When I applied previously, I started the paragraph with my title/position and added a bracket for the verifier number, like a citation (eg. Hospital volunteer (1): .....begin paragraph....)

[MathToMed]

No, I don't think you need to double verify things. If you are simply saying you work in a soup kitchen, and that activity already has a verifier, that is likely alright, you may want to include it anyway to be safe but it's entirely up to you (it's about 5 characters down the can if you do, but it might be worthwhile in case whoever is evaluating your ABS essays doesn't have access to your ABS).

I think what they mean is, if you refer to any specific activity or event, you need to have that verified. ie. "While working at the soup kitchen, some old guy slipped and spilled the soup and everyone laughed. [6] I then took it upon myself to show compassion, and clean up the elderly gentleman's clothing and provided more soup."

[House,M.D]

I think what they mean is, if you refer to any specific activity or event, you need to have that verified. ie. "While working at the soup kitchen, some old guy slipped and spilled the soup and everyone laughed. [6] I then took it upon myself to show compassion, and clean up the elderly gentleman's clothing and provided more soup."

 

That makes more sense to me. For the one essay about "directly intervening" I wrote about a time where I provided first aid to a pregnant women who got struck by a car. Without going to further detials, I have no one that can verify this as the police did not take my name, and the event it self was not in the newspapers becuase the women was involved in a crime at the time. At this point I'm going to leave the essay, but do you think my application will be denied because I could not provide a verifier?

[MathToMed]

 do you think my application will be denied because I could not provide a verifier?

 

Nope. I think they're aware of the fact that this is a plausible reason not to have a verifier.

 

Should you have time, you may want to consider changing the essay topic to something more verifiable. However you likely have a lot of good things to discuss, and I'm not even sure a different essay topic would suffice.

 

In short, I think verifying the activity is a secondary concern. Writing a good solid essay about a good solid experience, while speaking to 1 or more of UofT's clusters, is the more crucial aspect. If it's possible to hit all 4 of these aspects at once, then rewrite with a different topic. If not, then verifying is something that I strongly feel can fall to a back burner for this particular essay.

 

(Note: For the ABS Sketch essays, verifying is a bit more important).