An applicant admitted to a 1-year postgraduate program at George Brown College (Ontario), bringing a spouse on a SOWP, asked four planning questions: the best fee-payment mode for refund safety, whether to prepay the full program, GIC banking, and PR prospects after the PGWP.
What the thread substantively answered:
- Pay through the college's official payment channel. The concrete advice: use Flywire or another trusted provider that processes payments for colleges — an official, traceable channel is what makes a fee reversal on visa refusal straightforward. Avoid informal transfer routes.
- PGWP and SOWP jobs don't earn Express Entry job-offer points. The thread's sharpest correction: work on an open permit (PGWP or the spouse's SOWP) is not the kind of qualifying job offer that earns additional points — and converting a SOWP into an employer-specific (closed) permit isn't a shortcut to them. Plan the PR math around CRS fundamentals: age, education, language, and Canadian work experience via CEC or Ontario's programs.
- 'What are my PR chances' is homework, not a group answer. On the 2-year PR question, members redirected: calculate your own CRS, check current EE and OINP trends, and plan against your actual score rather than optimistic timelines.
The unanswered items (full-fee vs first-semester payment, best GIC bank, deposit size for two) drew no substantive replies in this thread — decide those from the college's and GIC banks' current published terms.