Uni 2022 entry where to start advice

[Spring2021]

DS bright lad is in current year 12 and really enjoys further Maths and Physics.
I am just conscious he has no definite idea what he really wants to do, or what Uni he fancies but that he wants to go to Uni. He is hoping to achieve at least A’s in Maths, Further Maths, Physics and possibly also A in French.
DH thinks he should decide which city he wants to live in first as one Uni course is much the same as another.
I thought think narrow it down by course then, look at Uni reviews and then narrow it down in to cities.
It just seems such an onerous daunting task. DS currently wants to go to Uni but has absolutely no idea which city he favours, exactly what he would like to study, what career he would like to go into or which city or Uni he fancies. Where does he/we start with this please? Any advice welcome and then we can narrow it down and attend some virtual Open days. Thanks

I agree with you:
Narrow down by course, then university and cities.

I think it's worth narrowing down location first. How far away is your DS prepared to be? Would he be happy studying in Scotland if you're in England, or Wales or NI whichever is relevant? Ease of travel. Campus vs city possibly.

Has he got access to Unifrog through school? That is helpful for research.

The UCAS website has lots of info too. I think you can put in your A levels and it will suggest courses. I think you can filter using your predicted grades too.

My dd has been looking at the subjects she is interested in and looking at the top unis for them and then working her way down the list. She is taking some online masterclasses this half term that some of the unis are running for year 12 and her school put her forward for a Cambridge scheme. Has he had a year 12 careers interview? Used career pilot? I would choose subject first then uni personally.

ScrapThatThen Thats what I was thinking. No he hasn’t had a Careers interview yet. Thanks Seeline I will
Mention Unifrog and UCAS.

He sounds like he could take his pick of good unis for maths, physics or engineering routes. If he is interested in politics then maybe something economics related or a joint honours economics or maths and a language. Would he be interested in a year abroad or an industry year? Lots of courses offer this.

Accommodation costs can vary hugely between universities, particularly after the first year when students are more likely to be renting privately. If cost is an issue, that aspect is worth considering. It's also worth thinking about whether your son would value being able to get home easily for the weekend (assuming Covid restrictions have eased a bit by then!) or whether he'd be fine with a really long journey between home and uni.

He sounds like a candidate for Oxbridge. Does his school/college have history of preparing kids for Oxbridge entry?

Otherwise make sure he doesn’t sell himself short. Aim high. He should be getting guidance at school - press them on what support is available.

And potential career doesn’t really matter at this point unless he is aiming fur a career which needs a vocational degree eg law, medicine, engineering, architecture.

DS2 is in Y12 too. He is studying History, English Literature, French and Drama and is predicted at least an A in all four subjects.

He has already had some activities through school looking at choosing university courses. He has a rough idea of what he might want to study (Politics, Modern History or possibly PPE). So far we've looked at some different university websites and sent off for prospectuses for places that look interesting. He has decided that he doesn't want to apply to Oxbridge.

He is actually far better prepared than DS1 was, he hadn't even really thought about it at this point in Y12!

Thanks all. He is enjoying year 12 and seems very focused on his studies now. Whereas, he seems to have coasted most of Secondary School. I am unsure what school are doing re: Careers guidance with choosing Uni’s/courses.

Our school didn’t do much either. There’s lots of info online but you can easily end up down a rabbit hole. I’d highly recommend getting a few hard copy prospectuses as they are easier to flick through for an idea of what’s out there. There’ll be degrees you & he have never heard of.
The usual approach is to first work out ‘what’ he wishes to study. It’s highly likely that whatever subject he chooses it’ll be available at lots of universities, however he may find a fascinating course that’s only offered at a few. He should also look at the modules that will be covered each year, the compulsory and optional. Please do not assume that, for example BSc Economics is the same at every uni, even with the exact same code they can be quite different.
He may then want to research the ‘best’ universities that offer his subject. ‘Best’ for him maybe the league tables, if it’s a targeted uni, get the best results, reputation, near home, cheaper accom, the city itself.
DD did tons of research and had a spreadsheet and a rather thick folder but it all started with the type of subject. It’s an important process for them in realising what’s important and what isn’t (to them).
He’ll also need to start thinking about his personal statement. There’s just one that has to go to all 5 of his choices. This is trickier to write if he’s applying to different courses especially if they are not easily combined. Again UCAS has good info about all of this.
By all means help him look, email him links, order varying prospectuses but in the main try to let him do it as it’s definitely a learning/engagement process for them as they chop/change/back again and really think it through. iykwim.

I’ve just posted this on another thread and it maybe helpful to your DS too
www.theuniguide.co.uk/
I don’t think this one has already been mentioned.

As a pp mentioned, the UCAS website is a good place to explore:
www.ucas.com/undergraduate
www.ucas.com/introducing-ucasdiscovery

Also the Uniguide site (where he can enter his A level combination and get suggestions for subject areas to look at at university) already linked to by @NotDonna.

I think Dc are going to have to look at admissions stats very closely. We know universities took more students than usual last year, with an impact on accommodation, and many deferred to this year. I've just seen this where this years applicants will be made offers for 2022. It's niche but unlikely to be an isolated case.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-56112743

I think that story is only going to apply to some of the degrees where you have to have the experience to be safe and effective in your job - eg in this case dental. It's unlikely to affect applications for most degrees, even if they are vocational to some extent like law or engineering, as you learn much more on the job.

ds will (hopefully) be uni entry 2022 too and has only recently decided what he wants to do. His indecision was mostly based on just not knowing what options were out there, this is what we did.

We started with a few hardcopy uni prospectuses (without worrying too much about the uni) and he looked at the different departments of the unis. From reading the prospectuses and looking the the departments/courses/descriptions/careers they could lead to he quickly discounted business/law/social/languages/medical/art/biology etc type subjects as the descriptions of the departments/courses just didn't interest him and he had more interest in maths, physics/chemistry, engineering, accountancy, computing type courses.

After a bit more research he narrowed it down to an interest in the "engineering" faculties. During this very high level process he might have missed some possibilities in other areas, especially computing as no exposure to it in school to relate to, but engineering feels a good fit with his past subject choices, interests and personality.

I had no idea, until he starting looking into it and talking about it, how broad "engineering" is with a few distinct disciplines and many many sub disciplines in lots of different and interesting areas and he found it much harder to pick between theses. After quite a bit of research he has now settled on what area interests him and is reading introduction/beginners books on the area to make sure it is what he really wants to do as it will be a big expensive commitment for many years.

It is great he now has a goal of what he wants to do (for the first time since he gave up wanting to be a professional footballer 🙄) and is enthusiastic about it, but he has picked a hard one with competitive entry. Just hope he gets his grades and a place now!!!

Sorry I've not read all the posts. Year 13 child here - Humanities not science so I don't know how different the advice would be.
What we did was look at the uni guide - she was predicted 3 X A so we only looked at AAB and above - it's a bit of a clunky site at times but it's good that you can alter your parameters. (Next dc is looking now and has different predicted grades so we're looking at different universities).
She then made a list of universities that offered her course and were offering those sorts of grades.
She then ruled out Scotland (just too far and we weren't sure about the finances).
She had about 15 on the list at this point.
She then looked briefly at course content and ruled out a few more.
She then had to make what for her was the most important decision - campus Vs city. She absolutely loathed the idea of a campus university but we had encouraged her to look at York, Exeter, Warwick, Birmingham etc to see if the course/area would persuade her that it was worth it - she decided absolutely not so all campus unis were crossed off the list, leaving her with about 8 options.
She then looked fairly seriously at the courses at those unis and we went on 6 virtual open days but mainly for the course content (maybe maths/physics are not similar everywhere?)
She then discounted London as too near to home.
She then was down to 5 which were the 5 she put in her UCAS.
The only thing I wished I'd known is that she could have put down fewer than 5 and added later. She applied early and she decided really quickly that her 5th choice wasn't a choice at all and she would rather defer than go there. She'd kind of picked it as she felt she had to have 5.
It didn't actually matter in the end but, given that she's still waiting for one offer and she had to wait till the end of Jan for another and her second favourite put her on hold (only for 3 weeks in the end but still it caused some stress), I think it would have been nice for her not to have had several weeks where her only 2 offers included one she really didn't want.
I wish we'd had the fun of seeing the universities but it did work ok.

*She did it all but wanted us involved so we tried to be as much as possible. In non covid times we'd have taken her to open days so we tried to do similar even though virtual.

The only thing I wished I'd known is that she could have put down fewer than 5 and added later.

Yes, a lot of applicants seem to miss that (it's under point 5) in the Filling in your UCAS undergraduate application section on the UCAS website. I hadn't really thought about it until someone pointed it out on TSR. Unfortunately, some school 'UCAS advisers' actually either don't tell their students that it is an option or, worse still, actually tell them that it isn't. Either they don't look at the website much themselves, or they want to make sure that no-one slips in a course / university the school doesn't approve of.

@Spring2021 Ds knew at GCSE what he wanted to do A level wise and was fairly certain of his degree choice but just in case that changed he and I together looked into degree courses in Computer Science but also Maths and Physics based ones too. He is now year 13 so it is all done but similar to chill

So working on CompSci as his top choice, he had already been chosen for the Cambridge outreach program as a "competitive entry" candidate ie high grades at GCSE, high predicted grades at A level.

Obviously this led to Cambridge being looked into. I came onto MN and looked at the Oxbridge aspirants thread from a previous year to get as much info as possible about supercurriculars ie what are you doing outside of your A levels that tells us as a uni (not just Oxbridge) that you love this subject. What are you reading, listening to, watching or engaging in? Luckily Ds had already done some online courses after GCSEs and been to some meet ups locally all to do with computer science.

Then he looked up the top 20 unis for CompSci and once identified looked on a map for distance. He ruled out Scotland (St Andrews) and any London uni. Cambridge was the furthest he would consider which was a few hours drive from home.

Then he looked at the grades for those remaining unis, Cambridge and Warwick, A A A, Manchester and Durham A* AA, Leeds AAA, York AAB etc.

His predicted grades are A A A* A so all accessible to him. Then he looked at the course content and for CompSci it is pretty much the same across all of them.

Then he went online and watched a lot of videos on the unis, what students thought, what it all looked like and narrowed it down from there. We were fortunate to see 2 unis in reality before the first lockdown, everything else has been online. He has 4 offers.

It does take quite a bit of head space and time but this is a great time to be thinking ahead.