In 2018, McGill’s admissions system was a patchwork: applicants used different platforms depending on the Faculty and whether they were seeking admission to undergraduate or graduate programs.
Fast-forward to 2024: A platform called Slate had allowed McGill to build a unified system for both admissions and recruitment.
The result is a system that 90 per cent of student respondents say is easy to use. It’s also highly popular with the employees who process applications.
“I’m really impressed with what the Slate team was able to accomplish,” said Professor David Stephens, Academic Lead for Horizon McGill. “They built this tool with a singular focus on making life simpler for incoming students – and at the same time, they’ve simplified the work of hundreds of staff across McGill, who no longer need to navigate a patchwork of platforms.”
“This is exactly the kind of project Horizon is looking to champion – initiatives that save time, decrease frustration and make McGill a better place to work and study.”
Fixing a fragmented system
In 2018, the Student Admission Systems Project – co-led by IT Services, Enrolment Services and Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (GPS) – was created and tasked with overhauling McGill’s fragmented admissions ecosystem.
Undergraduate applications were being processed in Minerva and Banner, graduate applicants had uApply and some Faculties were using their own custom-built systems. Meanwhile, some recruitment activities were handled separately in a platform called McGill in Mind.
“We had a very heavy and complex admissions process at McGill and there was no way for one person to understand it all,” explained Paula Molinas, Associate Director of Strategic Planning & Demand Management in IT Services, and a core member of the project team.
Issues ranged from lengthy downtime for manual maintenance to difficulty communicating with applicants and managing documents.
“It was really about shedding light on all these complex processes and asking why – why is everybody doing this differently and why is this so complicated?” said Molinas. “Our goal was to simplify the way we do admissions and standardize it as much as possible.”
Better for applicants and employees
In 2020, the project team selected Slate by Technolutions as the new all-in-one platform for recruitment and admissions.
Once it was configured for use at McGill, GPS was the first to start accepting applications through the new system in spring 2022. By the end of 2024, all Faculties and levels of study (including summer studies and postdoctoral programs) had adopted Slate.
“For prospective students, Slate really modernized the whole process,” said Nermein Gamal, McGill’s Associate Registrar and the Enrolment Services business lead on the project. “It’s a much more user-friendly and improved applicant experience, and we’ve gotten great feedback.”
Applicants are asked to share their feedback anonymously after responding to their offer of admission. One student, who was admitted to the Faculty of Law in 2024, wrote: “I think McGill has the best and most accessible application system. I’ve applied to several schools and encountered issues with all of them except McGill.”
This positive response is reinforced by broader data. In a 2025 survey of McGill students’ digital experiences, 90 per cent of respondents said applying to McGill was “easy.”
As for employees in Enrolment Services, “the fact that everyone is using the same system with the same rules just makes everything a lot more efficient. It allows us to make better informed, data-driven decisions and we’re able to make earlier offers to our applicants,” said Gamal.
Other benefits include improved eligibility filtering and analytics, better targeted communication with applicants, self-service options like interview booking and centralized document storage.
“What’s exciting here isn’t just the new and improved technology,” said Fabrice Labeau, Vice-President of Administration and Finance. “It’s the commitment to client satisfaction that sets a strong example for future service improvements at McGill.”
Ingredients of success
As Horizon McGill ramps up and other teams get ready to launch transformative projects of their own, the Slate team has some advice to share.
“I think our success had a lot to do with the mindset of the leaders involved. They took this as an opportunity to think outside the box,” said Molinas, speaking of project sponsors Josephine Nalbantoglu, Dean of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies, and Gillian Nycum, former Registrar and Executive Director of Enrolment Services.
“The ‘aha!’ moment for us was when we understood that nothing was a ‘no’ by default, and that we were allowed to dream and ask questions.”
Daniel Letendre, the Project Manager for the Slate implementation, points to the team’s collaborative spirit.
“Even though it was Enrolment Services and IT, it really felt like one team. Everybody wanted to attain the same goal and make things better,” he said.
For Gamal, one of the most important things was acknowledging progress throughout the project, not just at the end.
“The project team had good times, but we also had rough times, so we made sure to celebrate wins no matter how small they were,” Gamal said.