The University of Calgary is not part of the US Common App system, and it is not UCAS either. You apply through Calgary's own online application at ucalgary.ca, and for most undergraduate programs admission is decided almost entirely on your grades, not on a personal essay. There is no general "tell us about yourself" essay the way an American university would expect, and many applicants are admitted without writing a single paragraph of prose.
The catch is that a handful of competitive programs do require written work, and it matters a great deal when they do. The clearest example is the Bachelor of Health Sciences (BHSc), which requires a supplementary application built around four short written questions. Creative and performing arts programs (dance, music, visual studies) add auditions or portfolios, and some programs ask program-specific questions. If you are applying to one of these, the writing is where you separate yourself from a field of applicants with near-identical grades. This page coaches that writing, plus the strong statement of motivation you will want for scholarships and any program that gives you space to explain your interest.
01Grades first, prose second. For the majority of Calgary programs, your academic average is the decision. Where writing exists, it is a tie-breaker among strong-grade applicants, not a substitute for them. Write to confirm you are thoughtful and a fit, not to rescue a weak transcript.
02How you think, not what you have done. Calgary's BHSc says explicitly that its supplementary questions have no right or wrong answers and are designed to reveal how you think and express yourself. They reward reasoning, self-awareness, and honesty over a polished list of achievements. Show your reasoning on the page.
03Genuine fit for the specific program. Where Calgary asks why this program, it wants evidence you understand what the degree actually involves and why it suits you. Naming a specific course, research stream, lab, or feature of the Calgary program beats generic enthusiasm every time.
04Clear, plain, structured writing. These are short-answer responses, not literary essays. Calgary rewards answers that are direct, well-organized, and easy to follow under a tight word count. Clarity reads as competence.
2 prompts for Calgary, each broken down with annotated examples.
BHSc Question: How you thinkShort answer; aim for roughly 200-300 words per question (Calgary sets the exact field limits in the live form)
My grandmother manages diabetes, hypertension, and a fear of hospitals, and watching her appointments taught me that a treatment plan only works if it fits the person's actual life. When her doctor switched her to an insulin schedule that ignored her fasting during religious holidays, she simply stopped taking it and told no one. I realized the failure was not hers. The plan had been built for a patient who did not exist. So I started going to her appointments to translate, not just language, but constraints: that she eats one large meal, that she will not use a needle in front of family, that pills she cannot read the labels of end up in a drawer. We rebuilt the schedule around those facts and her numbers improved within two months. I want to study health sciences because that gap, between what is medically correct and what a real person can sustain, is the problem I find most interesting, and I would rather spend my life closing it than pretending it is the patient's fault.
Why this program / motivation statementVaries by program and scholarship form; typically a short statement of a few hundred words
I am applying to Calgary because I want to study health systems where the data and the patients are in the same building, and the Bachelor of Health Sciences lets me do exactly that. After leading a student project that mapped pharmacy wait times in my town, I learned that I am less interested in individual diagnoses than in why a whole system makes the same mistake repeatedly. Calgary's emphasis on research from the first year, and its connection to the Cumming School of Medicine, means I can test that interest early instead of waiting until graduate school. Specifically, I want to work toward the Health and Society stream, where population-level questions are the point rather than an afterthought. I am applying from the United States, and I chose Calgary deliberately: I want a program that treats research as something undergraduates actually do, not something they watch.