More or less, yeah. I'm accepted to both U of A as well as Grant MacEwan which has a one year Engineering transfer program (to the U of A generally, but also U of Calgary and a couple other schools). There is no GPA penalty, you're guaranteed a spot as long as you keep your GPA above a 2.0 (on the 4.0 scale) or a C- minimum. All of the schools that feed to the U of A with a similar transfer program have no penalty as to the seeding/choosing of specializations. Students, regardless of whether they spent their first year at the U or A or not, are all compiled into a list, GPA high to low, and the highest gets their first pick. On top of that, it's about $1k cheaper for the year and with my RESP in the gutter I really need to save as much as I can because I'd love to be graduated with no debt. Classes are 60-70 students vs 150+ and you can legit spend time with profs so I'm doing that :P

It's not like I'm getting a community college Engineering degree, hahah.

So basically I'm 99% sure I'm going into the transfer program at GMac and then eventually getting my B.Sc in XX Engineering from the U of A.