Another Path to Greatness - Part II

[BigWoollyJumpers]

Here we are.

@goodbyestranger yes but by the time a student has firmed and insured other uni's , it's too late to make an offer isn't it?

So if Durham is going to make an offer, they need to do it before a student firms and insures irrespective of if they want to be insured or not.

Or am I missing something?

I mean possibly you're missing the fact that Durham won't really mind if an able student goes elsewhere. That student is off their books and they're not going to devastated by it. What they're trying to avoid is Oxbridge applicants using Durham as an insurance, if at all possible. I think my caveat is that this year they've going to be hypersensitive about numbers. Clearly Durham usually tips out lots of offers early in the cycle to those who look likely to get an Oxbridge offer but at this stage in the cycle, this year, they may well be scrutinising applications with more than usual care.

@goodbyestranger I wonder how many students firm up an offer before hearing from all 5 unis?

I’m not so sure it’s Oxbridge related. Every year we have students in our office, asking about not yet receiving offers from certain Uni’s (it’s not just Durham) and you really need to enter the admission cycle of those Uni’s, on the assumption that you might not hear until very late in the cycle - however great your stats/application is. The strength of the application, just doesn’t seem to bear out any connection to the timing of the offer, unfortunately.

I think where Durham have perhaps not helped themselves this year, is introducing the new ‘college preference’ system, mid cycle. To ask applicants without an offer, to invest time & energy researching & listing 17 colleges, seems rather perverse. My niece is still waiting patiently (English), with no offer, yet spent a whole weekend ‘imagining’ herself at certain colleges and then listening on the sidelines, as others were allocated colleges last week.

The Head at my DS’s school, told the students ten days ago, that Durham had still only allocated approx 50% of offers and this does seem true within within his wider year group, particularly for certain v popular courses such as Law, History & English.

It really is difficult for them this year & it would have been better perhaps if the slower Uni’s could have helped the uncertainty by moving a bit quicker, but it seems not! Though, I suppose some Uni’s are also in a v difficult situation, whereas normally only 25% of the cohort might achieve their UCAS predictions, this year is going to be significantly higher, giving admissions a massive headache when calculating applicant/offer ratio.

I agree @Applepieco dd has also spent ages deciding on college ranking with no way of knowing if she will get an offer!

I don’t think I like the sound of Durham’s admissions process, it doesn’t seem to be very caring or putting the student’s interest at heart. Not wanting to be an insurance offer is ridiculous! First choice or nothing!?! Being someone’s second choice is good enough isn’t it?

Thanks Pumpkin and yes, an LSE offer would indeed make a difference. Apparently LSE have made NO offers yet (well, at least they’re consistent ). However, I’m really worried places are going to be massively limited this year. I’ve seen that for last year, courses that normally accept 150, took 250 and they had to sort accommodation all over the place, including private landlords etc.

If Durham are trying to second guess Oxbridge admissions, I really wish they wouldn’t. DS is talking online to the boy who got the place at the C college he applied to. There was only one place this year, due to a deferral, but how could you know that when you apply? This boy isn’t even going to go! He’s decided a Geog BA isn’t for him as he’s not interested in the compulsory human modules, and he wants to specialise and do Geology at Imperial instead (all his other applications were for Geology and so he obviously impressed the DoS and other interviewers who were 3 geologists and an oceanographer). DS’ entire first interview was about rocks! Anyway, he was pooled, but there’s no way applications in the pool are considered to the same degree. It all happens in the space if 2 days and you can see from the stats that many colleges haven’t taken from the pool in ten years for his subject. So, it is what it is, but I don’t think Durham should penalise people because they have put themselves through the Oxbridge process because of their own reticence to be an insurance choice (if this is what’s going on). It feels like you can’t win.

Does Durham give a reason for why a candidate is rejected?

I have noted on TSR that LSE, Imperial and I think even UCL does when informing of rejection which I think is very useful to the student

Ultimately all we are doing is second guessing why some universities are late in going decisions but LSE and UCL have told their applicants that decisions will be delayed due to increase in demand as well as the unprecedented pandemic

I think it just feels like ages for us as we started the whole process about a year ago with the Oxbridge prep

I am still feeling rather jaded after Cambridge rejection to be honest but will of course look excited for DS

@chopc

Yes - Durham add a small line re reason for rejection. Two of DS’s classmates got the response ‘ Academic profile not as strong as other candidates’ - I assume that’s GCSE results/ A level predictions.

Thanks @Applepieco

I’m feeling very jaded today too, choc. I know DS is lucky as he does have offers from UCL and Bath, but Bath we never visited and also, I have the words of my neighbour ringing in my mind all the time about UCL ie. her daughter went and didn’t have the best student experience. All the waiting really wears you down and I can tell it’s beginning to affect DS now as he’s much quieter than normal. Usually, he spends an hour or so most days doing his music in the basement, but the singing has stopped and he just looks depressed, tbh.

[quote bendmeoverbackwards]**@goodbyestranger I wonder how many students firm up an offer before hearing from all 5 unis?[/quote]
Quite a few do. Especially in circumstances where they have an Oxbridge/Imperial/(insert 1st preference) offer (which may match a potential Durham/(insert name of another late offeror) offer) and an acceptable true insurance offer i.e. one at lower grades.

@quest1on

I’m feeling very jaded today too, choc. I know DS is lucky as he does have offers from UCL and Bath, but Bath we never visited and also, I have the words of my neighbour ringing in my mind all the time about UCL ie. her daughter went and didn’t have the best student experience. All the waiting really wears you down and I can tell it’s beginning to affect DS now as he’s much quieter than normal. Usually, he spends an hour or so most days doing his music in the basement, but the singing has stopped and he just looks depressed, tbh.

All the waiting really wears you down and I can tell it’s beginning to affect DS now as he’s much quieter than normal. Usually, he spends an hour or so most days doing his music in the basement, but the singing has stopped and he just looks depressed, tbh

Your poor DS. I think lockdown and the prospect that they "may or may not" be going back to school is also making these last few weeks really extra depressing. I think we have all had enough of this last year. When the behavioural experts said at the start of the pandemic that there were only so many lockdowns and restrictions on lives that could be bourne, they were not wrong. I think we are all surviving, because that's what you have to do, but no-one is coming out of this unscathed.

@quest1on

I’m feeling very jaded today too, choc. I know DS is lucky as he does have offers from UCL and Bath, but Bath we never visited and also, I have the words of my neighbour ringing in my mind all the time about UCL ie. her daughter went and didn’t have the best student experience. All the waiting really wears you down and I can tell it’s beginning to affect DS now as he’s much quieter than normal. Usually, he spends an hour or so most days doing his music in the basement, but the singing has stopped and he just looks depressed, tbh.

If it helps I have had 2 friends who have kids who had the time of their lives at UCL, one so much so that he ended up buying his student flat from the landlord in Camden and lives there now pursuing his city career.

I think this is one of the reasons DD firmed up her offers so quickly. She just needed to move on, to have something to look forward to, to have a firm goal. To know where her life is leading.

@quest1on I hear you. I am SO hoping they will be able to go back to school - even for a week. Hopefully both our DS's will get their oomph back soon!

If I were you I would encourage him to stop communicating with the student who got the place at the same college who doesn't even want to go. I can't imagine that being in touch with this person will add anything positive to your DS's life or morale. Plus it's not like they were friends before anyway .

If you have a look at student experience YouTube videos, there will be positives and negatives at any university. A good student experience is not guaranteed anywhere - even at campus.

If your DS is anything like mine - I think they will enjoy the campus experience more. However DS liked the idea of being a student in London - and I couldn't blame him!

Thankyou for the kind words. God yes, we hope schools go back on the 8th. DS is fairly sociable and straightforward most of the time, but he doesn’t seem to want to meet up with a friend or anything at the moment (snot say why) and I’m really worried about these online people and that this is becoming a substitute for the social life he used to have. He does go out for walks every day but, I don’t know, I’m worried about them all to be honest.

@quest1on I would echo chopc's advice about encouraging/hoping your ds drops contact with the online individual who got a place at the college that your ds didn't.

I know you /he believe it to be genuine but I'd be worried that it is someone getting a kick from the drama of "having a dilemma" over not wanting something that others don't have and really would have liked to get.

To ask applicants without an offer, to invest time & energy researching & listing 17 colleges, seems rather perverse

There must have been a least some research done in the first place to apply for a college at Durham. The same for Oxbridge. Also you didn't have to list them all, you could leave it as one or have an open application. you could list 2 or 3 colleges, it didn't have to be all of them.

On old TSR threads students discuss their disappointment with their college allocation and discuss rejecting Durham based on that. You want old, historic and traditional and you get a new build modern hill college it would possibly change your mind. As I have said before Ds said he would take any college for Cambridge because it is Cambridge. Durham is not Cambridge.

Durham would be hard pushed to guess why someone chose a particular college, is it because it is catered? Location? Historic? En-suite? So having applicants list their preferences means they can possibly match their wants a little better. Ds's mate has been offered Castle! It was his first choice but he will only go to Durham if he doesn't get Bath.

And @quest1on definitely encourage your Ds to stop communication with the other student. It cannot be healthy or productive at this point.

I have watched way too many a lot of moving into uni and my uni experience to just see student accommodation and the issues students face day to day. It is very interesting. Also student what I eat in a week or spend in a week although some of those are ridiculous in terms of you must have money to burn with your £47 cocktail evening

Sending empathy to those who are feeling a bit fed up today, I can relate.

DH and DS had quite a spat yesterday over absolutely nothing- DS was saying how he'd spent his day revising maths and DH asked, quite innocently, when was the last time he had any fun- which was met with a torrent of scorn as to what a stupid question that was, how was anyone having any fun at the moment, etc etc - totally out of character for DS who is usually very chilled and laid back but is clearly feeling the strain of everything more than we realised. I think he's terrified of missing his Imperial offer now, having missed out on Cambridge, and is trying to bolster his maths having had an achievement (interim) grade of an A last week, rather than an A star. Notwithstanding that his teacher says he's on track and the achievement grade rather ridiculously in this case averages all marks ever from the start of year 12 - it's obviously worried him.

So I am currently sat in the garden with dpup, escaping everyone and hoping that the BT engineer fixes our wifi - that has added to the fun with two teenagers as I'm sure you can all imagine.

Also there was this paragraph in the Times a few days ago, in a much longer article- but apparently it's being widely shared as DS asked me about it having seen it on Instagram. Wondering if it's government kite-flying-

Exam boards are to ditch plans to force teenagers to sit mini exams to help them decide their GCSE and A-level results, under plans set to be published next week. Instead the tests will be voluntary and teachers will hold one-to-one meetings to students about the grades they should be aspiring to in order to avert last year’s grades fiasco.

Source - www.thetimes.co.uk/article/back-to-school-on-march-8-as-johnson-starts-lifting-lockdown-0v5zbz5bt

It's a paragraph towards the end of the article.

@quest1on and @Vargas these are the statistics from a previous BA Geography thread:

Some interesting 'What do they know' requests for the universities you mentioned: Durham, LSE and UCL

Durham:
www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/ba_geography_l702_admissions_sta#incoming-1268744

BA Geography: 530 apply, 520 get offers around 250 firm/insure but around about 100 of these candidates miss their offer.

LSE:
www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/application_statistics_geography#incoming-1609667

Of the 121 who got offers for BA Geography (and did A levels rather than, say, IB) only 15 did A level Geography. I was amazed at this statistic. (341 applications, 177 offers)

UCL
www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/geography_ba#incoming-1471734

Interesting Pumpkin. We’ll have to see what the stunning GW announces next week.

Thanks again for the supportive comments and yes, I do think it’s a bit perverse to say the least that DS is apparently talking to this boy who got the place at the college, especially as he’s been going on about how crap his GCSEs were and he only put Cambridge down on the spur of the moment, as actually he wants to study pure geology. I am trying to encourage DS to get off social media in general as I think it’s all too much. He had to block a very needy girl who got in for Geog too (different college) but isn’t going now because of her mental health history which would apparently be triggered by a particular college and her dad hadn’t been able to change the college. She was threatening to come and meet DS in London, so he blocked her, but now she’s apparently come back under a different name with the same issues. I will try and encourage him to delete the whole app. School can’t come soon enough, that’s all I can say.

I agree with pp's that if you get any college/room at Oxbridge, it is a lot less important than elsewhere. It matters in other unis, because they were not your first choice. However, it can be a positive.

DD1 got in to an alternative college in Oxford, and then was the unlucky recipient of the worst room available. By random ballot, she was literally the last pulled out of the hat. She got the cupboard at the top of the stairs, on the fifth floor, in a house on the High Street, not even in college. The room was so small it couldn't even accommodate the minimum standard of furniture. Think Harry Potter! I cried when I left her there. Her neighbour got a double room with a F*ing grand piano in it FGS. BUT, she survived. It made her get out and about, go to the main student block, and meet people. She didn't spend much time there, which turned out to be a really good thing.

So, it can be hard to not get what you want, but it may well turn out for the best. (She got first dibs on rooms the next year :-))

Oldowl - Thankyou and yes, those are the very stats that annoy me because you can see that in 2018/19, of 530 applicants for Geography, Durham made 520 offers . And other years are similar. So with this in mind, why the need to keep people waiting for 5 months? I wouldn’t mind if they were whittling 530 down to 100 or something and it was genuinely competitive in a normal year.

I doubt any of these unis will be making anywhere near this number of offers this year sadly, and this is the problem.

@Oldowl Thanks for that, really helpful.

Sorry to hear about kids getting down, of my 3 dc's the ds I talk about on this thread is the most resilient by far, and even he is getting fed up. If they don't go back on 8/3 he will be very disheartened. He mentioned today that he is worried about Uni not being 'normal' next year. I think if it looks like it will all be online next year then I will encourage him to defer. A few of my friends with kids at Uni this year have said they wished their dc's had deferred.