hi aska!
thank you so much for answering my question 🙂 (i’m the social sciences applicant who’s interested in psych)
your answer did raise some more questions for me though. will it be difficult to get into the prereq courses i need to apply for a psych major because of my admission stream?
i’ve heard that psych is a ridiculously popular program and they give priority to life sci students.
heyyo,
oh my goodness hi hello, i always love a returning customer!!!!
let’s look at your first question first: will it be difficult to get into the prereqs for the psychology major?
now looking at the website tells me that the only prerequisites for the psychology major are grade 12 calculus, grade 12 biology, and the first-year course PSY100. so unless your school has, like, five million people and only three calculus and biology classes, i think you should be good for 2/3 of those.
as for PSY100, i have more good news for you, because as it turns out PSY100 is one of the biggest classes in terms of enrolment numbers at uoft! if you take a look at this nifty tool called the timetable builder (my beloved), put in the faculty (arts and science), and type “PSY100” in the course code bar, we can see that the current PSY100 class this semester was capped at 1500 people, and there’s still 191 spots available. yowza. next semester there are TWO classes running, one with 500 people that’s filled up and one with 1500 that still has 446 available as i’m writing this.
the one catch to all that is that PSY100 has “P” enrollment controls. what on earth does that mean, you ask? well, if we look into the course itself on timetable builder we can see that certain students had priority enrollment until july 23 this year, and all other students in the faculty of arts and science could enroll starting on july 25. i believe that those with priority were first years in the life sci admission stream. we can see here that this year, first years enrolled in their courses on july 17, so life sci kids had an extra 6 days over everyone else.
that may seem a bit scary, but… there are still hundreds of spots left in both semester’s courses, and it’s november! i think you should be fine getting into PSY100.
as for getting to the PROGRAM, i scoured the internet literally everywhere i could think of and i didn’t see anything that says being in the life sci admission stream is an advantage to getting into the program. the only way i can see that being true is because that stream gives you priority to PSY100, but as we already found, i don’t think you’d have to worry about that. while this site does tell applicants to apply to the life sci stream, i think it’s just cause you’d get priority to PSY100. you can enroll in programs outside your admission stream. so as long as you have the prereqs and your grades are in the right range (check that out here!), you should be just as competitive as any applicants who came from the life sci stream.
i hope this helped answer some of the stuff i didn’t get to last time! i wish you the absolute best in grade 12 and hopefully we’ll see you in psych classes in a few years!
cheers,
aska