Uni offers for 2017 start

[Carriemac]

Could we have a handholding thread? I have two DCs going through UCSS at the moment, would love to obsess here so I can appear calm on the outside.
LNAT results go to the UNIs tomorrow I think, so offers could be rolling in soon for DD who has applied for law.

I looked at prices today. Even with a Railcard, return is going to be £157. We are not in the central belt.

The cheapest return I have seen for the last year or so was £89, with a railcard.

Can you get tickets refunded, if not used?

That depends on the network, check the T and Cs.
Would it be cheaper to use the west coast line through manchester?

Good Lord. My dd1 has HFA and anxiety (very often comorbid with HFA, especially in girls). She will find it very difficult to cope with her interview/s but in no way is she a 'precious weak thing'. She is a bloody strong girl, of whom I am immensely proud. Of course she is 'wanted at university'.

user3615 the idea that deafness is 'easy' is a very arrogant assumption, verging on the offensive. Another of my DC had one of the conditions you describe as being 'particularly difficult' at the time of her interviews and found the tutors extremely astute at gauging how to help her engage, both then and throughout her university degrees. Not everyone on MN discusses their own situation which is why I requested that you didn't make sweeping assumptions. I really would expect better from a reasonably perceptive academic who affects to champion those who are disadvantaged in one way or another.

Tried everything. Just looked, tickets are much more expensive if refundable. Hey Ho. Will wait and see. It takes more than 5 hours just to get to Glasgow from here!!

Rose DS has just been called for interview at Manchester at short notice and the best we could find was £262 - though raileasy has brought the price down to £78. When I book three months ahead the tickets from Glasgow are as little as £19.80 with a railcard. There is a possibility of doing that with Oxford, because they publish their outside dates so early. With the other unis who give very little notice it's far more difficult.

Sorry, cross post Rose. Have you tried raileasy? It was a revelation for Manchester.

Incidentally user3615 my DD didn't declare any issues whatsoever on her UCAS form as she was determined to be taken on her 'own merit', so the interviewing tutors were clearly sensitive without any need to be warned off. All credit to them.

I didn't say that deafness was "easy" to deal with: I said that arrangements were reasonably "straightforward". This is because advice/protocols/interview training are better developed for deafness and physical disabilities. (And don't make assumptions about me and my family either - you can't have any idea what disabilities my own family have.)

The plural of anecdote is not data. It's great to hear that DC receive appropriate accommodations. But it's not good that there is no or very little training in making such accommodations for interviewers when HFA, anxiety disorders etc are involved. It's not good that there is evidence of some DC with SEN having less than ideal experiences.

I am genuinely bewildered why anybody would want to defend the status quo against the need to analyse what we're doing and improve. Why on earth is the latter controversial? Don't you always have to acknowledge where weaknesses are in order to make improvements?

We live in N.I. so there's a flight in between us and most of the unis on dd1's list. We've been lucky with her Manchester interview date, as it isn't until Feb and is the day after the offer holders' visiting day at Bristol (which she wants to attend as she hasn't seen Bristol yet). So she can do both unis with one set of flights, and book the train between the two far enough in advance to get a discount. (If she gets an Oxford interview that would be an additional set of flights, but from her reaction to the PAT we think that's pretty unlikely.)

user, I'm delighted that you are engaged with trying to make access fairer. (not for any personal interest, my DD has no SN or social disadvantage.)

user3615 I agree with your general sentiments, unsurprisingly, and am engaged in access myself, as I've said previously, but your comments about superselective kids and siblings were unnecessarily personal and unwarranted.

Will try raileasy, thanks. Was using trainline and will try local station too!

Raileasy is a great call. Thanks. Got it down to £120! Still a fortune, but Santa will have to rein in the stockings.

Carriemac thank you for starting this thread, it's great to see the support from others making a real difference in people's experiences, that's exactly why I'm following it. I have felt uncomfortable at the thread veering towards the political as opposed to supportive and am thrilled it's back on track.
We don't owe anyone an explanation of our DC's abilities, SEN, sex, subject, university choice or anything else.
This isn't AIBU, it's more 'help me through this stressful experience so that I can offer the best support to my child'.
That's not to say that a separate thread about fairness of the Oxbridge system would't be valuable.
to everyone going through this looooong journey!

My son has had an offer from Warwick to do Mathematics - they want A maths, A further maths, and another two A grade A levels - he is doing physics and chemistry as well.

Ouf.

Ouch! Best of luck to your ds.

dd went to the maths talk at Warwick and she said that the grade requirements were scarily sky high. Physics isn't so stratospheric.

Hollybolly , when DS was applying to Oxford I joined an Oxbridge thread which was very supportive , often great laugh and I also got some tip top advice from a poster who had had a DC go through it for the same subject as DS. The main thing for me was it stopped me getting too stressed, as that was the last thing he could have done with. And I mean stressed in the sense it was hard seeing him want something which I could not do anything to help him with (well apart from making sure he had clean clothes for the interview . ) Good luck to your DC (sorry started typing now and forgotten whether it is a DS or D - but lots of luck either way).

Sorry typing too quickly meant to say, given that was only 1 of his five choices , so was the Uni Offers for that year thread (i.e. hugely supportive and a great laugh.) I can distinctly remember skulking about to see when offers were coming out for the universities DS had applied to. I think I managed to hide it from him . I suspect my insouciant questions to him were not as subtle as I thought they were, however.

Thank you Basilisk, my DS is already sick of the 'have you checked your email yet?' question I ask as soon as I walk through the door. The ridiculous thing is I know his Cambridge college isn't sending offers for interview until 14th November but it's almost a reflex now!
I'm trying to reign it in but he's so nonchalant about the whole thing, there were a couple of times that he hadn't checked and offers were waiting from other universities.
Congratulations to your DS ILove, is it just me or do the grades feel even higher when they are confirmed as an offer?!

Holly, ds1 did the whole Oxbridge thing a few years ago and we found his interview invitation in his email spam folder!!! Make sure your ds checks there too! Best of luck to him.

Hello everyone.

Thanks for the raileasy tip.

DS finally got his UCAS application in on 1st November for Biomedical Sciences. He is at a state sixth form college following years of fun and games at an inner city bog standard state comp.

He's predicted A*, B, B.

Amazingly he has an offer from Warwick for A,B,B. So happy for him (if he does the work!). Waiting to hear on the others.

Is that 'low' offer because of his school / postcode?

Liney - http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/courses/b900/ looks as though its the standard offer if he's doing biology and a second science. Fortunately not all (if any?) courses have offers like that warwick maths ()

I know someone who had a 3xA* offer for Music at Cambridge, last year. On paper, he is a brilliant applicant, so I'm not sure why the offer was so high.

He didn't get it, so this year he's applying to Oxford with his known grades, which are their "typical" offer.

That's pretty much the worst offer I had heard of, until Ilove's dS's offer. Ouf, indeed!

DD has finally heard from Edinburgh, who apparently don't start offering until all applications are in.

So, she's got offers from Bristol (A*AA) and Leeds (3xA) and is going through the application process for Cambridge and Manchester, and just has to keep waiting for Edinburgh. That's for English.

Thanks, Errol. That's really interesting. We did print the typical offer from the 2016 website when attempting to plan, and it was definitely AAA-AAB. I guess I didn't think it would shift so much.

DS is doing 3 'hard sciences' and Biology's his best subject, so I guess it's looking good for him.