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......

UCAS form went in yesterday and received an offer from Exeter this morning. AAA standard offer for economics but can drop a grade if firmed. Thought this sounded a bit odd rather than them saying reduced to AAA because I suppose he could now get in with AAB. But relieved that we must have filled in the form correctly!

That's great @calculatorqueen -well done to your DS

Congratulations @calculatorqueen, that’s amazing!! What did your DS apply for?

Ooooooh, offers coming in already, how exciting. Exeter seems pretty on the ball getting offers out so quickly. I will be worrying now if we don't get one quickly!

@mikeandike DS has applied for economics everywhere other than Oxford which is PPE. Hope your DD is feeling a bit better today.

Congrats to your DS @calculatorqueen - it's great to have an offer in the bag is it?

DD's heart is with Durham and Oxford is definitely a long shot. She's really happy therefore to have an Exeter offer where she feels she'd be more than happy to end up.

Those with bursary offers...

Is it a one-off or is it £2,000 p.a. ?

A friend's daughter got an annual bursary to study Physics at a Russell Group Uni. It really helped them with funding her Uni years. She's now secured funding for a Masters too as she's considered to have massive potential in her chosen field being a very academic individual.

I would love to know which unis give a bursary for Physics. How do I find out?

DD still feeling a bit unwell today but on the whole, she’s doing much better. Was adamant that she wanted to go in to school today to submit her coursework and got stopped in the corridor by the school HE counsellor who said the school has already emailed the unis to explain the situation with the admissions test. Thankfully, we can relax a bit now as half term here is next week. Bring on the wine!
@Jano69 Same here - DD’s dream uni is Durham, she’s trying not to dwell on Oxford. She’d be absolutely delighted to go to Exeter as well.

@ClarasZoo

www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/physics/undergraduate/ug-physics-scholarships.aspx

Thank you!

DD has her application ready to go but has 2 versions of her PS.
One uses almost the full word count but doesn’t have any spaces between paragraphs but the other is well under word count but leaves a blank line between each paragraph.

I think the one with the blank lines is easier to read but which is generally better? We don’t have anyone in her school to ask who has experience.

I don’t know which is better but ds’s statement didn’t have spaces but was checked and signed off by school.

Paid and sent here too. Probably right into the school rush so not holding breath....

Just a thought, but what does the PS actually look like, layout-wise, when it gets to its destination? I regularly have to read text that comes through an online form set up. Whatever the word count, it arrives all of a piece. Although I can well imagine that some of the authors have never heard of the concept of The Paragraph, others, I am sure, would not actually have submitted a 25-line 'slab'.

@ChimneyPot have you tried putting it into the UCAS application? DS had lines between his and was just under the character count, or so he thought. But when he put it into the actual application and pressed Preview, it was 5 lines too long. So he deleted all the lines between the paragraphs. It doesn't look as good IMO but it's the substance that matters... if he could have left the lines in, he would have done. Good luck!

I haven’t gone near it but she put it in both ways. Both work. The one with lines does fit because she edited it and the rewording reduced the word count.
I think she is over thinking at this stage and either will be fine. I just want her to decide and submit!

If the students call up UCAS to request their reference, can the school/their reference writer find out that the student has seen their reference?

Morning! Yes we had the same thing with the PS. In the end, he put it in with no spaces between paragraphs, but it was still clearly paragraphs because the last sentence of each paragraph finished mid-line, iyswim?

Congratulations to those with Exeter offers. What a great start!

All DS has had so far is an email from Bath to ask for an altered PS relevant to their course. We knew this would happen as they don’t offer his course, but do offer something similar and quite interesting, so they said they understand he is applying to 4 other unis and he could do an altered PS once they had received the first one. It never ends!

Plus, I think Durham give the option of another PS tailored to them? Is this still the case? DS didn’t put any non-academic stuff in the PS tailored for Oxbridge and LSE as they both state they are not interested in any of this. But apparently Durham are.

mike - Good question! I was wondering that too. Does anyone know?

Well, I expect they would soon find out if the student storms the citadel saying the school's reference wasn't good enough! If the reference was glowing, then the student would just keep schtum.

Surprised other schools are not telling the candidates their reference. DS's was read to him by the head (everybody has to schedule a meeting with the head, who reads the PS before, and then reads the reference to them in the meeting). In fact, DS was asked if there were things that he thought should go in the reference that weren't there - which there were actually, mostly because DS switched schools for Sixth Form, and they didn't know quite a few things about him (such as he was on the Year 10/11 Leadership Team of his old school, which he didn't mention in his PS, as it is not directly medicine related, and he had so much to say that was more relevant), so they said they would amend it to put that in. Also (and this was my suggestion to DS who then) DS suggested to the head that a couple of things that are in the PS go into the reference - my thinking being, a number of the medical schools are saying that they don't read the PS at all (on the grounds that they don't know how much is the DCs own work), but there are a couple of things in DS's PS (which are quite outing, so I won't give details) but which are highly relevant to a medical application - and which the school would have definitely known about had he been there since Year 7 (and the head agreed, so apparently they are going in).

The spaces between paras is a tricky one. DS deliberately wrote slightly long and I offered to help him precis after school comments came in and sat their chiselling off random adjectives, proudly coming in at 3997, and then of course found it was 7 lines too long.
I don't see how anyone fills their whole word count and keeps spaces between paras, and I will definitely advise DS2 to try to go for a three para structure when he comes to it - DS1 had about 6.

In the end he stuck two paras into one and chopped stuff out to keep the spacing so that the structure of the argument was clear, but I can totally see that the candidate with loads to say might say stuff it and cut out the empty lines.

Hard to know what to do for the best but probably not determining either way.

On Durham, there isn't really a pressing need for DS to do a separate one as he has squeezed in a last para (about 12% of word count only) on extra curricular stuff but I do wonder if it is worth just tweaking it to say “why I want to study history at Durham” rather than University and similar, so show willing. I do wonder how very hard it must be for people who do want to add extra-c stuff missing from their Oxbridge-focussed effort to cross out their carefully crafted course stuff.

Not sure what to advise him on this.

I suppose what is confidential is that they might mention where the pupil is in the cohort, eg, "Basil is the highest-placed pupil in a cohort of 75 taking Maths A Level." They wouldn't want Basil telling Cecil this, or indeed Cecil learning that he himself was placed 35th in the Maths cohort.

Revengeofthepangolins my DC manipulated their sentences to end mid-line, thus defining paragraphs.

But Irma since an applicant can ask UCAS to send their reference (which they do incredibly quickly), it's fairly pointless to hold back disclosure at the school end.

Also, Basil's reference would say eg Basil is an outstandingly talented mathematician, at the top of his large cohort of other exceptionally able mathematicians. Whereas Cecil's is extremely unlikely to mention his ranking, and will just say something flowery about his motivation or persistence or something else equally bland. So Cecil will never know!