UBC admissions blog

Congratulations on completing your UBC application! You’re one giant step closer to joining our vibrant community of students and faculty from around the globe.

Submitting your documents

Tens of thousands of UBC applicants like you have begun – or will soon begin – submitting their documents. The UBC Admissions Office is doing its best to read everyone’s personal profile and transcript as carefully and quickly as possible. We’re swamped with incoming documents, but we’re working very hard to process each one and give you a considered and fair decision as soon as we can. It may take a while for us to acknowledge that we’ve received your documents, so thank you for bearing with us at this busy time.

To find out what documents you need to send to us, check your email for a message from UBC, or log in to the Applicant Service Centre.

Your admissions decision

Depending on the degree you applied to, the standard of your application, and when your grades become available, high school applicants can expect an admissions decision any time between the end of January and May and post-secondary transfer applicants can expect an admissions decision any time between February and late June. Be sure to check your application status often in the Applicant Service Centre under Admissions > Application Status.

If you’re itching to know what comes next in the admissions process, check out the video below:

Until you hear back from us, take this time to learn more about the degree that you applied to. This is also a great opportunity to envision your future at UBC and have your questions answered by joining a campus tour, attending an event for applicants, or taking part in an online info session.

This year, we’ve received almost 10,000 applications from high school students who follow the Canadian curriculum and will be considered for a first-round offer of admission. That’s a lot of Personal Profiles to read! We’re already sending out first-round offers of admission and will continue to send them through to February 28. If you don’t receive an offer by February 28, don’t worry – no one will be refused admission during first-round offers of admission.

If I am not admitted by February 28, what do I do?

UBC is reviewing student applications every week. High school students who applied before the December 1 deadline will be admitted on different days as the weeks go by. All students who follow the Canadian curriculum and met the December 1 deadline will be considered for first-round offers of admission, and all of those offers will be finalized by February 28.

If you are not admitted by February 28, sit tight and follow the instructions we send you by email for additional grade information.

Can someone tell me if I’ll receive an offer?

If you contact our front-line team, they will not be able to tell you if you will be admitted. If you want to know what your current status is, have a look at the Applicant Service Centre (ASC). When you visit the ASC, you can learn about where your application is in the process by viewing your “Applicant Status.” The messaging on your applicant status will tell you if you have successfully submitted your application, list your dates and deadlines, and lay out your next steps.

If you have already been admitted, your applicant status will tell you that. If it does not say that you are admitted, check back after February 28. At that time, you’ll see new instructions that you must follow.

Do you wonder what happens after you submit your application?

After you submit your application, the Admissions Office reviews it and creates an electronic file for you. In a week or two, you’ll receive an email listing the additional information you need to submit in order to complete your application.

Check your email

Your email address is a crucial piece of information to submit with your online application. Please be sure to use an email address that you will be checking frequently. Also check your email provider’s spam filters so that UBC emails with important information are not being filtered out.

If your email provider mistakenly deleted something we sent you, you can also log in to the Applicant Service Centre and click on the Message Centre to see all the emails the Admissions Office has sent to you.

If you have any questions, contact us.

If you applied before December 1

We have started reading the personal profiles of everyone who submitted an application by December 1.

Successful Presidential Scholars Award candidates will be contacted in mid-April.

We’re close to finalizing all first-choice decisions for all Canadian applicants on the Student Service Centre. If you were offered admission, congratulations! If you were not offered admission, thank you for submitting an application and giving us the opportunity to get to know you better through your academic successes and Personal Profiles. We wish we could admit all qualified applicants, but with more applications than spaces, it’s just not possible. If you’re curious, here’s how UBC evaluates your application.

At this point, you might have a few questions:

What should you do if you’ve been placed on a waitlist? When will you receive a final decision?

If your application has been waitlisted, your application status will indicate when you can expect to receive a final – yes or no – decision. For the majority of programs at UBC, the deadline to accept offers of admission is May 1 (or June 1, depending on your campus), but you should check the date specified to you in your offer letter to find out when your deadline is. Once those dates pass, we’ll know how many students have accepted their offers. If fewer students accepted their offers than expected, we’ll make a few more offers to waitlisted applicants. If enough students accepted their offers, we’ll notify students on the waitlist that no additional offers will be made.

Our best advice is to move forward with other post-secondary plans in case we don’t make additional offers in May and June. If we do make more offers, we hope they’ll be considered, but we understand if students have made plans to study elsewhere.

What about your second choice?

Our goal is to have all second-choice decisions to students as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience as we continue to review the second-choice applications.

If you received an offer of admission for your first choice, we’ll stop there unless you contact us to request otherwise.

If you accept your second choice but you’re waitlisted for your first choice, will UBC still evaluate your first choice?

Yes, we always evaluate first choices, whether you accept or decline your second-choice offer. All waitlisted applicants will receive a final decision by the end of June.

You’ve been admitted to your first choice, but now you would prefer your second choice. Will UBC still evaluate your second choice?

We always assume that your first choice is what you prefer. If you’ve received an offer of admission for your first choice, we’ll only evaluate your second choice if you contact us and if there is still space available in your second-choice degree.

Where can you find your application status?

The best source of information on your application is always the Student Service Centre. When you log in to your account, you’ll find an up-to-date status for each of your degree choices.