Anyone else starting to plan the great Open Day trek?

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DD (year 12) has started to look at uni courses. Currently she is planning to go to Bristol, Sheffield, UEA, Edinburgh, Glasgow. So fairly scattered about.

Anyone else starting to look at similar?

That's true! She can always email them to say I am coming of she changes her mind.

We are going on an open day to oxford - was no way considered for my DS. But wr're going on a languages faculty day in exam centre and want to look around a few colleges afterwards but would not know where to begin. Apparently you can read about them online but how do you tell?
Any inside advice?

When we went to durham which is she thinks where she really wants to go, description of colleges sounded all the same. When we saw a few, she knew what she liked.

But we won't have loads of time in Oxford so would like to narrow it down. Any knowledgecout there?

Sorry about above typos- on my phone.

I think offer days/course days are different. They feel a lot more personal. We went with DD1 to hers but by that point she was showing us round. This was the uni she wanted to be at and did get into.

It's true how many whole families go along. DD1 and I felt positively restrained as being only the two of us!

Well, there are no bad colleges. A few things to consider -
Central or happy to be further out?
Old/newer?
Very traditional/more forward thinking? (Doesn't necessarily match up with old or new!)
Do you want a college that offers accommodation for all three/four years, or do you fancy the freedom of a house (and not having to empty your room each term!) for a year or two?
If you live out, how far from college might you be/want to be?
Cost of accommodation, cost of food.
Distance from the faculty - does it matter to you?
Are you bothered about the Norrington table?
Sporting prowess, or lack of!
General facilities.
Most courses are done at all colleges, but not all - check.
Do you like the sound of your subject tutors? (You might get sent to other colleges for tutorials anyway.)

That might give a jumping off point, and I expect others will have more to add. There are detailed stats about offer rates, etc, but these do change from year to year, so don't get too caught up in them.

DD has booked 8 open days in all. 1st one next weekend. Not expecting her to actually want to do all of them once she has been to a few, but going with it for now. Second time round for us too. Rather more organised than her brother who left it until September of Year 13 and then wondered why he couldn't fit them all in

DS has a sheet with a list of uni's he wants to look at and dates for open days. There are 7. Mostly northern and within driving distance of a couple of hours at the most.

Quite a few of them clash date wise so he is going to ask if he can take the odd day off school as I'm pretty sure exams will be out of the way and it will be close to the end of the school year.

Are you finding your DCs to be choosing place to study or course? DD2 has very definite views on the course she wants to study and is finding that not so many places offer what she wants hence the great trek!

A bit of both. Once she had decided on the course, she then looked at where did it, and then decided if she liked the idea of where it was. She's not a RG student though, so possibly has more choice 😃

I was thinking about the questions I would ask based on our experiences with dd1. I will be missing out the parent finance talk, but hitting the accommodation office to ask if they guarantee hall places to people who have them as insurance, rather than firm. We got rather badly burned on this with Dd1and ended up in private halls which were £££££'s.

Dd1 has also suggested asking whether lecture notes are available if for some reason a lecture is missed. She has been pretty unwell over the first couple of months and has struggled to find people with notes from the lectures she missed.

One down, seven more to go!

One here as well. DD went on her dry run with big sister. Both seemed to have had a great time. I think seeing a university in the flesh is a useful part of the 'making it real' process. Even if it wasn't one she wants to go to.

Funnily enough our first one was to DS's uni where she definitely didn't want to go. She was very impressed 😂😂😂

Dd has also been to her first open day. At our local university which she definitely doesn't want to go to.
(Went with a group of friends just to be nosey really)
She LOVED it!
At least they have a benchmark for the rest I suppose!

I just hope the ones the definitely want 'on paper' live up to expectations .