Sometimes it can feel like the pressure to go to A university is so overwhelming it doesn’t matter which one you go to. There are so many to choose from that paralysis can set in, and you pick randomly, if at all.
Your choice deserves more thought than that. You’ll be living and working in this place for at least three years of your life, and the results you get, the experiences you have and the friends you make will be part of your life for years to come.
We’ve got some tips to offer to help demystify the process of choosing some possible unis, so you end somewhere you’ll be happy, as well as productive and successful.
League Tables
If you have a strong sense of the career you want to go into, your choice of subject is very important. If you know you want to be a teacher, this gives a good foundation for the research you need to do: you can look at the league tables of universities offering Education as a course.
Just looking at ranking isn’t the end of the process though: while some universities might get extraordinary results, you can also check into which ones have the most students in a job of their choice in the years following graduation. An institution that gets extremely good academic results might still falter at supporting students into careers after graduation.
You can then compare your list of top institutions with their average offer, to find a balance between the results you expect to get at A Level, and the results you want your university to get for you.
Visit
Bfore you make a final choice, take advantage of the Open Days all universities offer. This gives you the chance to view the campus, meet the lecturers you’ll be working with and also talk to students to get insights you might not get from the official website!
You can also get tours of halls of residence so you can make sure that, for example, the University of Huddersfield accommodation is up to the high standard of it’s Education course.
Seeing the university is a really valuable chance to find out if you’ll be happy there: remember, your gut reaction is as important a part of the decision making process as all the research you can do online.