Oxbridge Aspirants 2021 - New Thread (2)

[Baaaahhhhh]

Sorry posted last message on the last thread:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/higher_education/3757768-Oxbridge-Aspirants-Sep-2021

Here is the new one......

DS1 has mocks for predicted grades this week so we will be finalising Uni choice once we have them. I think he is more stressed than he is letting on so I am keeping it very low key at the moment

Exactly the same here Chaz. Roll on the weekend!

First day back tomorrow, so hopefully will find out when mocks are taking place. And really just hoping all goes as smoothly as possible for as long as possible, although I fear we will limp from isolation to lock down etc etc!

Mocks as well this week. Fingers crossed!

DS2 seems fine. He says the Sixth Form Centre is really busy, and thinks there are more Y12 than usual. But also Y13 are currently not allowed to be off-site during frees. No Mocks, he had his predictions before the summer with the exception of FM, as he was awarded an AS for that.

Hope driving lesson went ok Bash. DS2 finally managed to book a driving test for this week, do fingers crossed.

DD's just gone back and is about to have exams to, already has working predicted grades of AAA* and has done an EPQ during lockdown. She's thinking English or Classics and English at Oxford (but not at all convinced she wants to go there.. )

Not being able to visit makes it more difficult. Also she has no idea which college to choose! They all seem to have pros and cons.

Not sure what happened there!
Predicted A A A*
(hope that works!)

I don’t think DD is likely to get over invested in her Oxford application,
The first thing her guidance counsellor in school told her when she said she wanted to apply to Oxford was “No one ever gets in”

Apparently the school has had the occasional student apply over the years but none have been successful.

Her predicted grades should be fine, she is doing 8 subjects, the usual here is 6 and Oxford offer based on 6. English, Maths and Irish language are compulsory. Irish language she might be predicted the equivalent of an A rather than an A The other 7should be A predictions. we call them H1.

The school have registered as a test centre for the Oxford aptitude test for the first time. They agreed to do it because there is a strong possibility of a local lockdown which could make it difficult or impossible to do the test anywhere else. So that is one less stress.

Assuming a state school are you in the top five for all your subjects? Do you have a real passion for the subject as it is taught at Oxford (or Cambridge)?
Apply. Good Luck.

Draft of the personal statement has gone off to the Oxbridge person at college for comments. Will be interesting to see what returns. We need to crack on with the uni visits. Hopefully will get to see Warwick and Birmingham this weekend.

Are you going to visit the universities? Or just the towns?
I can only find online open days

I can only find online open days

Yes they are all 'virtual' at the moment, but if O / C run anything like the virtual open days elsewhere that DS2 has 'attended', actually properly interactive sessions, not just looking at information as if accessing pages on a website, so don't not engage with these thinking that they are an adjunct to the 'real thing's- they are the real thing for the time being...

As for visiting the location, obviously, unless your area or theirs is in lockdown, at the moment there is no restriction on doing this, just like any other shopper / visitor to such attractions as may currently be open, even if you can't actually see inside the colleges themselves?

Southampton are running a series of vitual open days, but they are all daytime and weekdays, and not at half term...... meaning DD can't join any of them. Not very useful.

Random question here (apologies)... DS just trying to fit his personal statement into the UCAS box and it’s a little over the character limit. Might anyone know if they are supposed to leave spaces between paragraphs?

@quest1on It depends how you want to set it out but there are no empty lines in Ds's if that is what you mean.

Ds's was 46 lines and 3996 characters. He got to a stage where it was just over the 4000 characters and he wouldn't cut anything out just starting rephrasing and editing.

He managed to get "paragraphs" in so it doesn't look like a giant solid wall of text. There is a carriage return (enter) after his introduction, then 2 in the main body and then one before his final bit on his extra curricular stuff. It just leaves space at the end of some of the sentences.

It also depends how many "characters" the paragraphs your son has are interpreted by UCAS. We played around a lot with Ds's format wise within UCAS to see how it would appear with the line numbers.

quest1on You can see on the other Year13 thread the issues we are having with DD's UCAS - but on the character count, we did a good job by reducing the number of comma's, she does love a comma! Also lots of linking words, therefore, however, blah blah.

Thanks! He had initially typed it in Google Docs or similar and the word count had come to just under 4000 inc spaces, but I think when he put it in the UCAS form, then it was over. I guess it’s something to do with formatting. But there were about 4 paragraphs and spaces in between each one. He hasn’t put extra-curricular in as apparently Cambridge and LSE aren’t interested and you can do a separate one for Durham anyway. But if he had no paragraph spacing, he could get more in maybe, yes.

Also, if anyone is applying to Cambridge, how did you DC choose their college? Did you look at admission stats? Location? Size?

@quest1on we were lucky enough to have gone to Cambridge back in February half term so got to walk round many colleges but not all thanks to the stupidity of extinction rebellion digging up Trinity lawn.

We did look at the admissions statistics for his course and the colleges mainly because he didn't want to be 1 of 2 people taking his course as if you don't like that person you are stuck with them for 3 years so he chose ones that had 5 students or more. Some of the colleges want As in certain subjects so Queens wants As in maths, FM, physics and computer science so that means they would want Ds to get 4 A*s as he is taking all of those subjects so it ruled that out.

He has settled on a particular college but he is on the Cambridge HE+ scheme and was meant to be on a residential at that specific college which sadly got cancelled due to covid. They put on their own online open day for those students back in March. It included student's experiences from other colleges and a Q & A session.

I know Cambridge has an online open day 17th/18th September and it has good times ie 3pm so after school. Plus the colleges do their own too, you have to check to see when they are. It is completely shit that students are having to decide these things with very little personal experience. However much Ds wants this college though he has said I don't care if I end up in winter pool if they offer, I am taking it

DD was stipulated an A* in her degree A level , not explicit at her college as it was at some others. I think the conditions are conditional...

Well what an interesting turn of events!

Ds wants to do compsci so it states the typical A A A and all colleges require A level maths and some colleges want A level FM and Physics. When you go into the colleges page it has changed for 2021 entry. Both Churchill and Queens wanted Physics, that is no longer the case, and several colleges seemed to have dropped the FM A* too. It is puzzling.

No university wants an A level in compsci for compsci, only maths and FM and Ds is A* in those.

Dd has picked a college, but fortunately has said that she’ll take anywhere if she’s lucky enough to get a place.

I have seen people saying they’re not going if they get a place at an “ugly” college. Mind you, ds didn’t like the third college he was sent to for interview and said he was relieved not to get in - and that was an old, picturesque college. He said it was freezing cold and so were the stony-faced interviewers!

Mine has picked one based purely on the choral aspect suiting her best. It's probably not what she may have gone for otherwise, but it's not important how pretty something is and she'd literally take anything!

She may end up at a different one, or most likely, at none at all.

Keeping an mind is important I think.

PS (version 9) has got a thumbs up - finally - hooray!

The next issue is they are unhappy with her college choice. I think I noted earlier that she loved Worcester (Oxford) and wanted to apply there. Word from another very successful Oxbridge school (private) is to not apply there due to state school bias. We had heard rumours, but were going for it, now this school has said they are not applying there at all....... so back to square one. As said before, Magdalen out because DD1 went there, Christchurch out because of bad rep. Anyone else got any brilliant insights?

DD thinking of open application now......

Baaaahhhh - just wondering about Christchurch’s reputation? Dc about to start there and I’m a bit worried now. Are you concerned about it’s reputation on a subject level or college level?

As far as college choice goes, Dc applied to one, was interviewed at a second and ended up at a third college.

In an open application, I understand UCAS appoint a college ... does anyone know of this is definitely the case? Also, it is said that an applicant has an equal chance of an offer... surely that has to be the case in terms of a fair playing field?