Welcome to the next installment in our series of posts about the offer process. Today we focus on the waitlist.
Getting waitlisted means the wait continues, unfortunately. Being in limbo is tough and we sympathize with applicants in this position. After the first round, we try to shorten the length of the offer rounds in order to get through the waitlist more quickly. Still, though, the waitlist can be unpredictable, and due to this we do not reveal the length of the waitlist or where an applicant is on it. We want to avoid giving false hope or false despair, so we keep the waitlist to ourselves. While we always keep a few people on the waitlist up until classes start, once we have a better handle on how things are going we try to shorten the waitlist so applicants who aren’t going to get a spot can move on with their other plans.
There have been a couple of questions about the waitlist on other recent posts, so please check out the comments. If you have more questions ask away!
Dear Admissions,
What if I am waitlisted at UBC (1st choice) and have been accepted at another medical school (2nd choice) in Canada? If I accept the offer at the other medical school, will I be taken off the waitlist at UBC? Or will I be kept on the waitlist?
Thank you!
A
In this situation you would be kept on our waitlist. If you receive an offer from us, you would have to withdraw from the other school in order to accept our offer because you cannot hold positions in multiple medical schools.
Does the wait list start moving immediately as the offers get declined, or will it start doing so after May 23?
It won’t move until after the 23rd. We’ll try to get the next round of offers out as soon as possible after the 23rd to keep things moving.
At this point I am waitlisted and would accept a position at the NMP if offered, however would not accept a position at any of the other campuses. In the waitlist letter it says to notify admissions of any such preferences. Would this preference remove me from the waitlist, skip over my position in the waitlist until a position at NMP opens, or change in another way?
You would still be on ‘The Waitlist’ (the list of everyone who is waitlisted) but we would remove your name from all of the site-specific lists except NMP. This wouldn’t change your position at all. It would just save us from sending you an offer to a site that you would decline anyway.
I just want to clarify something. It says above “While we always keep a few people on the waitlist up until classes start, once we have a better handle on how things are going we try to shorten the waitlist so applicants who aren’t going to get a spot can move on with their other plans.” Just to be sure, admissions will begin sending out “regrets” during the same time as admissions sends out offers to waitlisters?
At some point, once we can better assess how much more waitlist movement is likely to occur, we will send regrets to people on the waitlist who have not gotten an offer yet and will unfortunately not receive an offer this year. This is ‘shortening the waitlist’. There will still be some people left on the waitlist, and any offers will go to these applicants and/or to applicants who have gotten an offer but are waitlisted for a more-preferred site.