Can anyone kindly look at DDS current uni choices. Honest feedback most welcome

[drivinmecrazy]

DD is in the process of deciding which unis she will apply for after the summer.
Her plan is to study English and Spanish.
Current favourites are Royal Holloway, Nottingham, Queen Marys and Surrey.
TBH her heart is completely set on Royal Holloway at the moment.
We're due to start our visits next week.
Courses are quite similar so think it might come down to personal choice (obviously with the proviso that she achieves her predicted grades).
Anyone with any strong feelings either way on her choices? Any feedback very much appreciated.
It's our first time round with uni applications so stabbing in the dark at the moment!!

Your d's might change her mind after visiting the unis.
DH has a job where he regularly visits different unis. When ds2 was applying he was adamant he didn't want a campus uni but dg persuaded him to take a look at Nottingham as he felt ds2 would love it.
Ds2 grudgingly went to the open day and came back raving about it, put it as his first choice and is now just finishing his first year there.
He loves the campus, loves the city, cycles everywhere but the trams and buses are very good. He's moving into a shared house in September in a student area and looking forward to that.
Originally he was determined that Bristol would be his first choice. After the uni visits, he relegated Bristol to his fourth choice and turned down the offer when it came.

Not much going on in Surrey town. That may suit or not. Obviously you can get train into London easily. I studied at a campus uni with small ish town and found that by the third year I was bored and everything was too familiar. Often it comes down to gut feeling when you view. Also look at accommodation - is it halls all years or just one or two. How is it allocated etc cost etc opportunities for work if need money.
Been ages since I went though!

Also check if many students dissapear at weekends. Friend studied at Brunel and was given flat share. MOst people in her flat went home at weekend or flew home abroad - chose a uni near London as was easy to commute. She said was like a ghost town at times. But this was years ago so....

I went to Brunel too calming and in a flat share of 6 there was only 2 of us left at weekends

Thanks whatwouldrondo, my guess was completely off mark then.
Do you think the tests are really effective at selecting best fit for purpose? I know it is not supposed to be an exact science.
It would be interesting to interview a sample of those who failed screening compared with those who passed (preferably matched for academics and the interviewers blind to who had failed and passed).

Unless (which is possible) something has changed RH always did attract London level student loans. This is due to it being part of the Ubiversity of London’s despite being geographically not in London. It’s a historic thing as RH is actually an amalgamation of two unis, one of which was central London.

PS only positive things to say re RH. It is definitely quieter but London is in reach. Most students either go home or into London at the weekend.

send These tests and their use as part of the assessment board process are not new, it was just that in the past they were administered on the day of the assessment. Some of the big employers used them for a sift even before they could do so online offering candidates the opportunity to sit them at test centres in their regional offices, or even on the milk round. And the reasoning tests are widely used not just for selection by employers and schools but also for assessment of learning difficulties and potential in businesses and schools (I have heard of a number of individuals recently whose dyslexia was not picked up until they joined the big 4 because they were the first to spot that attainment in exams was not matching their intellectual ability ) so their effectiveness as a way of measuring intellectual ability is well developed and understood.

The assessment board method of selection was actually developed by the Civil Service originally decades ago but the obvious benefit of gathering a wide range of evidence on a candidate in order to determine whether they have the qualities needed to do the job well meant that other employers adopted it as well. There are fashions of course, in business what goes around comes around and the banks for instance went through a phase of arguing the subjectivity of its managers without any accountability was the best way of selecting but most of them have moved back to using assessment boards.

No part of the assessment board process hasn't been developed and repeatedly tested to make sure it is recruiting the best candidates, indeed as an assessor your part in the process is constantly reviewed both by the board chairman on the day to see how it lines up with the other evidence (and they do an interview too to follow up any shortfalls there may be in the evidence already gathered) as well to see how your assessment matches up with their line managers in future appraisals. You are held accountable and given support if there are weaknesses or even just not invited to future boards. The process is one of constant review and development.

It makes sense a business will spend many thousands training and developing an individual, it makes sense to invest in making sure you get the ones best equipped to do the job well.

OP The lack of MFL provision in state schools is leading to a shortage of good candidates doing MFL, in complete contrast to the increasing demand for candidates with language skills in business and government, a fairly obvious requirement for the Foreign Office. Depending on her other qualities your DD may well find that she is actually in particular demand.

Looking at the Complete University guide league table for Iberian Studies I was surprised to see Surrey so far ahead of RH (and indeed Nottingham) knowing how satisfied students studying Spanish at RH are, but then when you look closer they are actually similar on student satisfaction and research but entry standards and especially employability is much lower for RH. I would have thought that tracking employment statistics for language graduates is going to be problematic, especially for universities who tend to attract affluent often expat students. No offence to Guildford but a French chateau, being part of London University and on a fast line to London and Heathrow are definitely part of the draw to RH over Surrey. Whatever the rankings n the face of it these are issues to explore at Open Days.

I have by the way no particular allegiance to RH, just that I have heard only good things about MFL there and I am somewhat taken aback by the perceptions being expressed here which seem to have consigned it to a level of prestige not far above London Metropolitan as opposed to a solid redbrick (and pretty with it) university

Has your DD looked at Kings, from actual experience their Iberian Studies department is particularly strong especially for literary studies.

And Surrey has an astronomic employability score which suggests it is perhaps vocational and graduates are going on to employment from placements, a strength at Surrey?

The IFS report summary states “Even after allowing for the fact that RG universities take the brightest students, they still make the highest returns”. That means income earned. It’s all well and good to say RG is marketing but this important work used them as a body of universities for their research. It clearly is not just marketing in their eyes.

whatwould, RH is way better than Middlesex, London Met etc of ocurse it is. It is however just a bit below the top rung, that's all and that is reflected in the grade requirements. It is certainly not a bad place to go. If you can get the grades to go to one of the slightly higher regarded ones I would probably do so.

The Russell Group is a political lobbying group. I have no idea why the IFS might choose to split universities into a Russell Group and the rest, a convenient divide or even political lobbying perhaps. The fact is that non RG Bath has some of the best courses with some of the best employment prospects of any university, no big employer is ever going to miss them out of their recruitment round. The same is true of other non RG unis with highly ranked courses, it would be very unwise to dismiss them, just because they are not RG. They are not RG because they chose instead to be part of the defunct political lobbying group, I forget its name, that sprang up to represent the good newer universities and specialist institutions like SOAS but never quite got its marketing mojo in the way Russell Group did (and I will concede that, it has been a masterful marketing strategy)

But some Russell Group Universities do not offer the best courses. Undoubtedly some of the best universities in the country went to that meeting in the Russell Hotel and some good ones have joined. Both my DDs went to RG universities and had great experiences but they did not choose them because they were RG but because they offered the best course and environment for them. My scientist would have had Bath as her insurance if they had not been asking the same astronomical grades as the other elite universities. I have not heard good things of every RG university course though even at Nottingham which undoubtedly is good for most subjects I have heard for instance arts students complaining that they were packed into lecture theatres and had little contact time, basically treated like commodities and left feeling they had not been nurtured and treated as individuals, which would certainly be a means of giving them the confidence and self esteem to succeed in the jobs market.

I have absolutely no worries about the future employment prospects of the MFL students I know at RH. Their years out in particular have given them some amazing skills and experiences, and actually the same is true of Manchester.

Xenia The requires grades for MFL are lower everywhere, it is even an easier course to get into at Oxbridge. As I said before in a sense OPs daughter has fewer worries about employability because all things being equal she will be in demand, a lot of the global organisations are making a language a minimum requirement and at least one of the big 4 has an international perspective as one of the qualities it defines as requiring in their successful candidates.

I didn’t say RG always offer the best courses. They plainly don’t. Clearly Bath is a fantastic university but it appears there are few in this category which offer the same outcomes as RG. Grads with higher salaries. Bath has lots of sandwich courses and that leads to employment. Good employment. However, for the moment, if RG universities wish to market themselves, that’s fine, but the IFS report makes it very clear, they are worth the hype overall. That does not mean that some courses at the other universities are not good. That’s not the conclusion they come to either. It still means students should be savvy about choice of university and there’s no getting away from that.

whatwouldrondo I was n't doubting the competency of the administration of the tests. I also get the fact that the selection process can be quality controlled for those who are selected however it can't for candidates like Needmoresleep's DS who never got through that first screening.
I am more doubtful on the robustness of situational judgment tests for selection.

send They have a long history as well, it used to be the in tray exercise where you had to make a judgement about the priority and actions for various bits of correspondence in the days when paper pushing was a relevant skill! As I say I firmly believe that good management is mostly common sense anyway but it is surprising how little of it there is about and best to sift out at the start! I suspect with Needmores son that there is some positive discrimination going on, so many public organisations are desperate to increase their diversity. I also see it from the other side via involvement with a mentoring charity. It is an uphill battle to steer bright students from disadvantaged backgrounds away from medicine and other vocatiinal courses and towards university versities and courses that would equip them for employment in eg the civil service.

Sorry about the over jumpy autocorrect

Send, I suspect DS can live with not getting through the first filter. The previous year he passed the final, assessment stage, for an internship with the same organisation (though was not offered a place) so it was odd. Presumably the first sift this year was seeking a different balance between technical skills and other attributes, including diversity. He would have scored highly on the first, but not the second.

And thats really the point. Selection means selection. Some people get places, others dont. Previously interviewers may have used criteria they personally thought were important. Including perhaps the University you went to as well as a golf handicap or gender. Now an organisation may decide the criteria they are looking for in advance inter alia to avoid indiviual prejudices. Whether they get these right, or whether the tests accurately measure applicants ability to deliver to these criteria, is anyone's guess. There will still be a limited number of jobs and so some will get them, others wont.

The medicine threads will throw up examples of weird Situation Judgement results. And individual recruiters will claim that the pre-screening means candidates can be rather samey. But from an individual's perspective I suspect if you are well qualified it will still be a case that you get some jobs you apply to, but not others.

The losers may be those who have generalist degrees from 'good' universities, who assumed that they could always apply for accountancy or the civil service. The jobs are still there, but without a rounded CV offering skills and experience beyond a degree, you might struggle. The competition is strong and recruiters will be looking beyond the degree.

From observation there are certainly a few recent graduates, even from Oxbridge, who have been surprised at how tough the graduate job market is and who have struggled.

Whatwouldrondo and Needmoresleep again interesting and informative perspectives.
Government organisations like the civil service have only one application system for certain graduate schemes and therefore IMO should be as transparent as possible similarly to universities like Oxbridge attempt to be. They should make public the ranges of screening test scores and other key criteria such as diversity shared by successful candidates over a number of years. It is fine to be rejected but better if you know why.
It is not like being able to apply for multiple different firms in the private sector or different medical schools.

I dont think anyone has said this yet....

When looking at courses, ask if the RH still allow you to take one optional course per year at another university of London uni.

When I was at RH I did a course at one of the UCL colleges in my second year, and the university paid my travel to London on that day. (So as not to financially disadvantage us compared to students at the inner London colleges.) Very nice perk, and offered even more choice of modules to choose from.

RH has an amazing history, it is easy to be impressed by the Founder's building. Like a lot of places they have upped their game in terms of student accommodation in the last few years based on what I saw on a recent visit back. No more orange water and sleeping two people on single camp beds. Which is surely part of the student experience?? I agree with others who say there is not a lot off campus - shopping, swimming pool and cinema in Staines. Its very easy and quick to get to London though. It didn't really suit me at the time, so Im not a massive advocate, although I think it would suit me better now!

UEA Norwich

Friend's DD did English and Spanish there as a sandwich with time in MADRID

Really enjoyed the Uni campus and course