Support thread for anyone applying through UCAS this year

[Lorelai]

Following on from a thread in chat I thought I would start this so that we can hold each others' hands through the UCAS process with all its challenges.

Who's with me?

sieglinde, from what I know it was a rejection after interview for Maths.

My DC was rejected and she too had 3A*s and 2 As. She was very disappointed but is now happy where she is, although it took a while. However, despite the disappointment I am glad she tried. With hindsight maybe she should have had a gap year and tried again but due to the increased competition she didn't want to lose the offers she did have. It is a difficult decision to have to make.

Maths is horribly hard to get into, adamschic, actually as bad as medicine. Very dependent on the pre-tests, too, and kids in the state sector don't get as much coaching - though parents with money can buy extra tutoring....

Thank god the word is now out about not all colleges being equal. Some are hugely more oversubscribed, and others have admissions tutors with Views on e.g. northern accents, I'm afraid. Can't give overall advice, but if you expect colleges with deerparks, with or without actual deer, to be egalitarian you will probably be disappointed. Not invariably, but probably.

funny at some level - course, college, cohort, tutors - it's about luck. If it wasn't, your DS would be in.

sieglinde Elly Nowell has just given the college a platform to say that six out of seven of this year's offerees for Law are from the state sector. Etonians are not actually thick on the ground (a handful each year?) and even accents as northern as Geordie can be heard to echo around.

Agree with funnyperson about some schools' attitude to Oxbridge. At my dc's school it seems to be only the Oxbridge offers that matter, even though it's easier to get an Oxbridge offer in some subjects (eg classics) that it is in certain subjects at other top unis (economics/medicine). But it's the Oxbridge offers that are the only focus and that the school uses to measure it's 'success'. Not helped by the media as well... This is by no means to undermine the achievement of getting a place, which is considerable, but it would be nice if other successes got recognition as well.

Our school makes a big effort to recognise all successes, thankfully.

History resit tomorrow afternoon,tensions very high here .

Good luck, WoodentopJnr.

Exam tomorrow here too. ds has had his head in the books all weekend, never seen that before!

Thanks,this feels quite big and he is not used to resits.Also this is his weakest subject,he needs a B at least in this paper

Same with us mrswoodentopexcept our resit is on Tuesday for geography...
Good luck to all taking exams this week and next week. These resits and A2s seem to go on for ever!!

Yes, I saw that about deerparkland, yellowstone, but I'm afraid this isn't the case in my subject, nor in all subjects. Agree with the general point that Oxford is not on the whole snobbish, though

I thought the most ludicrous idea was Elly's demand for water during her interview. I conduct the interviews, typically 15 plus in a day, and I don't have water in front of me, or any other beverage.... and describing this as 'torture' is just insane. Made me grunt 'oo does she think she is? :) Her effort would have been much more effective if she had been rejecting an actual offer.

Good luck with the resits, Mrswoodentop and goinggetstough.

Since she was in Y11 DDs school have a group of students who they groom for Oxbridge, it seems to have made no difference whatsoever, similar offers to previous years and the two that got the offers were the real top achievers. I would like to think that if some of the people they dropped from the group (like my DC) had applied they may have had different results but I don't think this really is the case.

Elly Nowell? Deer Park land???

We have two modules on the go as well, good luck to all!

Elly Nowell is the woman who applied for law at Magdalen and then 'rejected' them in a letter modelled on Oxford rejection letters. she then wrote a piece ofr the Guardian about it. Hope it helped cheer up some rejected applicants. Magdalen is the only Oxford college with a deer park, though the deer are a bit pathetic - they aren't red deer or even fallow, but Japanese sika deer, and they were a gift from Japan. PROPER toffs know this, of course . The deer are a bit - well, New Money, dear. Trinity Cambridge also has a deer park but it doesn't have any deer therein.

Hope all is clear now.

On grooming for Oxbridge - could I just say to ALL that if you have a dc trying for Oxbridge then their best move is to make contact with the SUBJECT TUTOR at the chosen college and ask for advice. FORGET the designated admissions person and double-triple forget the central admissions office, home of disinformation, and go to the website to find the subject tutors. Schools that groom in all sectors often utterly fail to do this themselves and sometimes give WRONG ADVICE, especially about college choice. Don't be worried about putting them off, but if they don't respond to one email within a week, try another college; it's a sign.

Ok, waiting for Yellowstone to tell me how wrong I am, comme d'habitude

Sieglinde, you are very funny on the subject of deer parks.

I think they should be a joke, actually.

Absolutely correct about the water sieglinde, it's not a caff

Wow, Yellow. Surely we aren't in agreement? :)

Personally I think we should OPEN an admissions bar and caff in every interview room to stave off our looming financial woes. We'd have a captive audience and could charge motorway prices.

Also - trying to extend the bridgehead here - she said we told people what to do, presumably at interview? I do tend to insist on telling them to turn up at a particular time, to a particular place - AIBU? Then I often ask them questions - I suppose that's rather controlling of me. Clearly what I should do is hand over a foaming latte and sit back while they opine. Poor lass is in other words just a silly kid.

Interesting how CATCHING rage is. She was plainly having a hissy, and I find myself hissing back a bit.

Just take bribes and be done with it, Sieglinde.

Good article in The Sunday Times by India Knight on Elly Nowell.She points out that Oxford is not renowned for it's portakabins so the architecture can hardly have been a surprise.

Must say I just thought she sounded ill mannered and imature.

I agree about young Ms Nowell, Mrs W.

Re Oxford college choice: as far as I could make out, my son's school didn't give any advice about which college to apply for, except suggesting that it would be a good idea if the people applying for the same subject didn't all apply to the same college. He found it difficult choosing the college because he had no very strong preferences, but in the end got it down to two and then one, not quite by tossing a coin, but not far off. Oddly, after his interviews at that college he was then pooled to the other one, which made him an offer. As far as I can make out, that's where the luck came in, as if he'd been pooled somewhere else the outcome might not have been so rosy.

Now wondering if we should be sending Sieglinde some used fivers in a brown envelope...

Even less of a surprise when it's a reapplication mrsw. Very, very weak ahead of an offer. She must have been confident one wasn't going to be forthcoming.

Poor deer.

Read it now, think she must have known she'd blown the interview and got in first rather than be rejected again.

I do know somebody who got an offer and turned it down and it was partly because she thought they treated her badly when she went for interview (nothing to do with water).

FWIW she isn't happy where she has gone...

I sort of agree what you are saying about Ms Nowell, but then again, perhaps she applied thinking all that tradition was what she wanted, found at interview she really didn't like it & withdrew her application in a humorous way in order to give someone else a better chance of an offer. Her arguments do seem rather weak, but we're probably reading rather more into the letter than was intended? I'm left wondering if she maybe applied with the full intention of doing this (I mean it's always Magdalen and their deer park people have a go at isn't it?) but I think if she was going to turn the place down, then it's better for everyone else to do it sooner rather than later (ie: pre rather than post offer), and obviously better for publicity for her to do it without risking a rejection.

Very shocked by the pedestals that funnypersons school (& others) put up their Oxbridge offerees. It's always going to be a bit of a gamble, but most people who narrowly miss out go on to be very happy and successful elsewhere, but that outcome is obviously not going to be helped along by such attitudes.

sieglinde is the college choice important for all subjects? I was under the impression that some subjects were much more organised than others at redistributing their candidates between colleges. Good advice to approach college tutors for advice themselves, rather than rely on school opinions - I imagine very few schools have enough Oxbridge experience to really know what they're talking about. Ds's school didn't pretend to have advice on college choice for him, which is much better than giving out inaccurate info.