Help - where on Earth to start

[BosomySusan]

DD is in Y12 and has absolutely no clue what she wants to do or where she wants to go. She's the eldest so we have not gone down this road before and I'm finding it impossible to help her.
ive advised her to think about the type of place she wants to go to rather than a specific place but other than 'a city' she has no idea. She went to the ucas fair at Exeter this week but didn't find it at all useful.
What should we be doing st this stage? I worry that we'll miss the boat on eg open days etc because we have no clue what we are doing.

If she wants to do something quite mainstream like Geography then she will have a huge choice of places to think about.

If she wants to do something more specific like costume design she will need to start looking at which universities offer the course.

What is she doing at A level and what sort of grades might she be getting?

My daughter knew that she wanted a campus uni in a city. (I live in the suburbs which she finds dull and she's not a fan of public transport)
She knew what her predicted grades were and decided on a 4 hour radius from home out of convenience. She then started reading course descriptions on the uni websites. This helped narrow down her list.

As for subject, she is doing one of her A-levels as a degree. There are areas that you can specialise in within this subject but she knew that she'd rather do the general degree rather than specialise immediately. She plans to do a masters so plans to do a more specific degree then.

I would suggest that your dd starts be reading the course description of her favourite A-level. Hopefully this will make it clear whether or not that's interesting to her. The same course can be different at each uni so it would be good to read more than one.

There's a search engine where you can search for courses based to predicted grades.That may help as a starting point for research.

Go for careers adviser at school and work experience

Snap! The perceived wisdom is to pick the course and then the university but that only works if they know what they want to do!
Careers advice at school was hopeless!

What is she interested in, enjoys and is good at? What kind of salary does she want to earn? Work in an office/outside/a mixture.
all good questions to get started with thinking about .

I'd agree that a subject is the first thing to pick! Or, even more basic, "academic" or "vocational" (or "creative arts" which is sometimes seen as a third category). Different universities are good for different things.

She's doing maths, biology, psychology. Enjoying psychology, tolerating maths, hating biology. She'll get predicted grades next term, at the moment it's just wildly inconsistent (85% one week, 25% the next)

@BookayIsOK thats sort of the approach I took when I was looking for myself, I went through the ucas guide highlighting smallish campus unis within a certain distance of home. And with a 50/50 male/female mix although I'd hope that's not such a factor 30 years down the line!

she has absolutely no idea what she wants to do, literally none. She just wants to earn loads of money 🤦🏻‍♀️ she can be fairly academic when she puts her mind to it but I don't think she has the temperament to knuckle down and get top grades at the moment.

OP, is your DD completely sure she wants to go to university rather than get a job after A levels, or is that question up for discussion?

No she's not sure she wants to go to uni, we have discussed at great lengths all options like a gap year, a job, an apprenticeship. We'll support whatever she wants to do but she doesn't want to do any of it.
She doesn't want to be an adult basically! she'd love nothing more than dossing around at home doing nothing.. which is the one thing we won't support. And actually, while she thinks she'd love it, as soon as her friends all disappear away to uni, I think the novelty would wear off.

Who does she admire in terms of the work/lifestyle they have? Loads of money like a corporate lawyer or banker, or like the Kardashians, or like tech millionaires, to take extreme examples?
That might help to work out what she needs to do to get on the right path, which might or might not be university.

Psychology benefits from mathy people, why not study psychology. I started with travel distance (< 4 hrs) and expected grades (low to high expectations compared to tariff required).