Ascent · Arts, media & design
The portfolio is the application.
In this stream the transcript is a threshold and the portfolio is the decision. That changes the calendar completely: the work has to exist, be curated, be photographed, and be submitted — often while students in every other stream are still thinking about deadlines.
Commonly required
- ENG4U
- A portfolio, an audition, or both
- Architecture adds Grade 12 math and physics
Prerequisites and supplementary requirements change year to year and vary by program. Everything here is orientation — we verify each requirement against the program's current admissions page before your student's list is final.
What decides it
Where the weight really falls.
Portfolio deadlines run ahead of everything else
They arrive on their own schedule, separate from the application itself, and the work cannot be produced in the week before. Usable pieces need to be accumulating through Grade 11 and the summer after it.
Curation is a separate skill from making
A portfolio is not everything a student has made. It's a chosen set that shows range and a point of view, sequenced deliberately, and photographed so the work doesn't lose half its quality on the way in.
Interviews and auditions
Some programs — Waterloo Architecture among them — interview. Others audition. Both reward a student who can talk about their own work without apologizing for it, which is a thing you practise.
In practice
What Ascent does here.
- Building a portfolio calendar backwards from the earliest deadline, so the work is finished before it's needed
- Curating and sequencing the set, and getting it documented properly rather than photographed on a phone the night before
- Interview and audition practice, specifically on talking about their own work
Where students apply
- Architecture — Waterloo
- OCAD University
- Creative Industries and RTA — Toronto Metropolitan
- Media, Information & Technoculture — Western
- Fine Arts and Design — York
- Music — across Ontario
Representative programs, not a list to apply from — the real list gets built around your student's grades, courses, and what they want out of the degree.
Other streams
Students often sit across two of these.
Next step
Plan the arts and design application properly.
An Ascent session starts with the transcript and the target, and ends with a written plan for what happens between now and the deadline.
Timing — arts and design
Grade 11 · spring
The portfolio calendar gets built, working backwards from the earliest deadline on the list.
Summer before Grade 12
The bulk of the making — the last stretch of unbroken time before school competes for it.
Grade 12 · fall and winter
Curation, documentation, submission, and practice for interviews and auditions.