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07/24/2003 Archived Entry: "Rejected in Ontario, teen goes to Princeton"

WHY CANADA CONTINUES TO SUFFER: Say you're a 19-year old high school student. You maintain an impressive 91 per cent average and you even went to Rome to participate in scientific research on Alzheimer's disease. This isn't some gopher work as reward for having won a high school science fair, this is legitimate research that landed you on the cover of a national current events magazine.

So you graduate high school and apply to Canadian universities. You are certain that they will fight tooth and nail for you as they should. Imagine then, to your utter surprise, that you are rejected by all three. You are rejected although you maintained a stellar average, have garnered international acclaim and will be one of the bright lights of medical research in the years to come due to one small matter: You did not complete all the courses required for admission and you have no mid-term marks, all required by Ontario's centralized university application centre.

Sounds like something made up? Eva Vertes would disagree. It happened to her.

Rather than sit around waiting for Ontario to make an exception, the young woman decided to accept a scholarship at Princeton.

"I went to visit Princeton and I fell in love after five minutes," said Ms. Vertes, who is spending her summer researching Lou Gehrig's disease at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto. "They are doing excellent biomedical research, and it's accessible to undergraduates."

Thank God we lost another Canadian thanks to bureaucracy.

Read on.