What to consider at open days

[mamabluestar]

Hi, my DD (Yr12) and I will be attending open days of her choosing over the next few months.

I was wondering if anyone has any suggestions of questions/things to think about?

I don't want us to get there, be flustered and not make the most of the time we have.

Thank you

The last of our DC still at university has masses of contact with academics. Sure, seminars are sometimes led by PhD students (this is more true in first year) but often by post-docs and associate lecturers. That doesn't mean there is no contact with the academic leading the module however.

@reluctantbrit

Register with your email or pester your child to forward everything to you. We nearly missed to book a parking space at one uni.

I'd suggest setting up a new email with forwarding to both yours and your child's email addresses, so you both receive the same and you can keep an eye on what's coming through, but let your child take the lead and make them responsible.

The thing is that once they go through UCAS and start getting emails from various Unis, your child really needs to take responsibility, and certainly when they choose the Uni and accept the place, they'll be bombarded by emails from their department, student union, pastoral care, careers, clubs & societies, student finance, Uni finance, accommodation depts, library, etc - and THEY need to take responsibility and learn how to manage huge numbers of emails otherwise they'll miss important things.

Once they're there, you can't be micro managing them so the sooner they take control and responsibility, the better.

@taxguru - we found that when DD got into the habit of checking emails, she managed UCAS quite well.
It is a lot and she often double-checks with us if it's just "Information" or if she needs to do something.

We set a new one up for Student Finance though, that is really a topic on it's own and difficult to navigate. She also is entitled to DSA so that was another mountain of forms, appointments and so on.

It gets worse once they're at Uni, as they're getting "pinged" from all directions and worse still, it's via lots of different media, not just emails, as there are also class/module/departmental/flat/college/club/sports whatsapp groups, facebook groups, twitter accounts, etc., all with important messages! The sooner they discover what works for them in terms of saving/actioning important messages and deleting/archiving the background noise, the better.

Even more so as when they start applying for jobs, they'll have to learn to manage deadlines for each step of the protracted application processes. Our DS applied for around 20 graduate scheme jobs, all with different application deadlines, then different deadlines for completing aptitude tests, online interviews, virtual assessment centres, etc. So easy to miss a deadline or miss an online interview or assessment centre if you're not on top of it - especially when you've already got a busy schedule of tutorials, seminars, lectures, etc on the same days, not to mention deadlines for submitting Uni work! DS created a mammoth spreadsheet to manage all the tasks and deadlines when he started seeing the "workload" involved with the job applications - up to then, he just about coped with Uni workload by memory and post it notes, but the job applications were on a different level and he used the spreadsheet to create colour coded charts to control/manage it all.