The Ultimate University Survival Guide

CHAPTER 1

BEFORE YOU GO TO UNIVERSITY

So, you want to go to university? Amazing! There are a few things you need to do before you find yourself in the lecture hall (or the nightclub) on day one of Freshers’ Week, so I’ve dedicated the first section of this book to the pre-uni hustle. After all, there’s a personal statement to write, the emotional roller coaster that is UCAS Track and the small matter of exams to get through first. And we all know the ‘h’ in exam season stands for ‘happiness’ …

How to pick your course

Of course, the first thing you should think about when applying to go to university is *drum roll please* the course you’ll be studying! It’s so crucial that you get this right and opt for something that you’re genuinely passionate about, because you’ve got to live, breathe and sleep it (or, indeed, get-no-sleep-and-pull-an-all-nighter it) for three, four or even more years.

And the key word there is you. Your subject has to be something you care about. Not what your parents think will lead to a successful career that they can brag about to strangers they meet on dog walks. Not what your teachers tell you you’re destined to study because you pretend you know what’s going on in class surprisingly convincingly. Not what your horoscope suggests you’d be good (or Sagit-terrible) at. You don’t want to be the one left picking up the Pisces.

It’s about what you know you enjoy. It’s about studying the thing that is going to wake you up in the morning and excite you.

The best way to get an insight into what a course entails is by checking different university department websites. Often they’ll have full breakdowns of what each year of the course expects of you and the content they cover.

If there are a few different subjects that you particularly enjoyed or excelled in during your GCSEs, A Levels, BTECs or IB years, and you can’t quite pick one, then investigate all of them. There’s no harm in not knowing just yet, and no shame in testing the water of a few different subjects at this initial stage. It can be hard narrowing down your options – it’s like picking your favourite Friends character. Although we all know no one’s favourite is Ross.*

Alternatively, there’s always the safety-net option of taking what’s known as ‘combined honours’, which means you study multiple subjects. If you opt for this, it’s probably a good idea to take two subjects that complement each other (like History and Politics, Maths and Physics, or English and Psychology), but that’s not to say that other combinations aren’t valid, too. In fact, the more obscure the combination you go for, the more nuanced and unique your research and dissertation could be – although that’s a pretty intense, long-term investment in a 12,000-word essay.

At open days, it’s definitely a good idea to go to subject talks, where a professor will give a presentation on the experience you can expect from a specific degree. If there are multiple subjects that you’re toying with then go to all the different subject presentations, and that should make it pretty clear to you which one excites you the most. I certainly found it useful for narrowing down my options.

Reading lists and lecture breakdowns† should be available online via faculty websites and will be invaluable in your decision-making. Also, every uni is different and creates their own unique modules, as well as a different way of studying (and examining) the subject, so it’s worth casting your net pretty wide at first.

Another thing to look out for is a subject that you’ve never had a chance to study before, especially those that link to the subjects you have taken previously. Not everyone will have had the opportunity to study things like Anthropology, Geology or Film before university, but one of them may actually be the course you’re best suited to. Often course documents/guides will suggest some traditional subjects that facilitate these more specific degrees – for example, a background in Biology or History would complement an Anthropology‡ degree perfectly. *Italian chef kiss*

I suppose the main point here is that picking the right course for you to study should be your number-one priority, because it’s the thing that will envelope your life for the foreseeable future. No subject is too niche, or too broad, or too hard, or too easy, regardless of what anyone tells you. Pursue what is going to intrigue and fascinate you, because it’s going to be an enormous part of your university experience.

* Disclaimer: I mean that no one’s favourite Friends character is the palaeontologist Ross, who has more divorces than cats have lives … not just any normal person called Ross. I’m sure other people called Ross are lovely.

† The idea of ‘lecture breakdowns’ is something you will become very familiar with over the course of your degree, in a very different context to the one I’m referring to here.

‡ Anthropology is the study of human cultures and societies and their development. I will confess, I had never even heard of this before going to uni and coming face to face with budding anthropologists. To be totally honest, I’m still not 100 per cent sure what it entails. However, it most definitely does exist and sounds fascinating! Just make sure you can spell it.

Open days and picking the perfect university

On open days, universities ‘open’ their doors to allow prospective students to have a mooch around and suss out their potential new home. I remember being very self-conscious on open days, because I felt like the bigwigs at the uni were watching my every move and waiting for me to give them a reason not to accept me. One thing I thought I’d tell you straight away is that nothing you do on the open day will have an impact on your chances of getting in … unless you kill someone.

Open days are for you. They’re for the university to show off their facilities and try to entice you into applying. This is their chance to win you over. That’s why they practically throw freebies at prospective pupils.

Things you should consider when picking a university

1 Location: How far away from home is it?* Is the commute to/from this location easy or complicated? What other cities are nearby?

2 Grade expectations: What grades do the universities expect from you? I’d recommend applying to at least one uni that is quite ambitious, and at least two that are safe bets (as in, you know you’re likely to get the grades they’d expect of you).

3 Accommodation: What are the different types of accommodation available? How close to the campus or university buildings are they? What’s the bathroom situation? What’s the kitchen/common area like?

4 Campus/city: Campus universities are very self-contained, and usually a bus ride away from the city. They’ll have accommodation, department buildings and probably a club all in one central hub. City universities have their academic facilities dotted around, so you get to actually live in the city centre.

5 Catered/self-catered: Lots of unis have the option to be catered in your first year (meaning your meals are cooked for you and served in a dining hall) – this can be very sociable and ameliorates one of those initial living-alone stresses of having to cook for yourself. Being self-catered, however, gives you lots more independence and flexibility, and is also cheaper. Pick whichever suits you best.

6 Facilities: If you’re training to play tennis at Wimbledon, it’s probably pretty crucial that your uni has a tennis court. Make sure the one you pick has the facilities you need: a gym; access to a swimming pool; study spaces etc.

7 Opportunities: The student experience is obviously key. Make sure all your dreams for uni are going to be satisfied, for example by ski trips, volunteering projects and charity challenges like Jailbreak.

8 Careers: What links does the university have to your ideal career path? Will they set you up with the right contacts? For example, if you’re hoping to study media or film, a specialist university with connections to those industries is going to be more beneficial to you than, say, a Russell Group institution.

9 Culture: Edinburgh has the Fringe, Manchester and London are cultural capitals, Brighton and Newcastle have wild nights out. Do some research to see what life in the city is like, and what events they have going on.

Make sure you ask loads of questions. Remember all the students volunteering at open days have given up their time to be there, and want to help you. They also aren’t trying to sell the uni to you and so will be as brutally honest as they can be.

Also, take photos! There’s a big time gap between open days and results day when you find out if your place is confirmed, and you’ll appreciate the reminders of what the accommodation and facilities look like. Plus, all the universities you visit tend to kind of merge into one in your head, so photos are useful reminders of which is which.

Check if you need tickets to visit certain accommodation or university buildings, as some are so popular that the uni has to regulate how many people are inside at each time. All info will be on the university website.

My top tip would be to keep track of your opinions on each university by having a score sheet on your phone. Rate each one on the accommodation, the facilities and all the other aspects I spoke about above, and then you’ll have a quantitative way of comparing them. My parents also kept their own score sheets and we’d sit and compare them after each open day, as I appreciated having a second (or third) opinion.

An example score sheet would be:

* I should add that distance is actually much less of a big deal than you may first think. I moved 350 miles away from home for university and was terrified, but actually, once you’re there, you totally forget about the distance. I didn’t apply to unis that were in Scotland because it felt too far from home, and I regretted it massively. It’s also great to experience a brand-new part of the country that isn’t anywhere near home.

How to write a killer personal statement

So, how do you write the perfect personal statement without, on the one hand, sounding arrogant and self-congratulatory or, on the other, underselling yourself and seeming a bit unimpressive. How do you prove your undying passion for a subject you most likely picked out of a process of elimination? How do you reference texts, and do you need to bother actually reading them? I’ve been to countless talks at top universities about how to concoct the perfect personal statement and so, with this guide, I’ve got you covered. Also, spoiler alert, YES, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, YOU SHOULD DEFINITELY HAVE READ THE TEXTS YOU MENTION.

(Note: These are personal statements that are killer in the positive sense – they pack a punch; a knockout blow assured to secure your space at the uni of your dreams. They are not personal statements for killers. We’re not applying to be the next Ted Bundy. Even if the process of writing a personal statement can be Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile.)*

The essentials

Think of your personal statement as an essay, only it’s an essay on yourself. It’s a way of showing an admissions officer – who, by the way, just wants you to make their job easier – what you’re about and why you’re the best thing since someone had the ingenious idea of putting peanuts inside M&M’s. (Seriously, where’s their Nobel Prize?)

1 Remember what information has already been covered in the rest of your application. When you apply to a university, it’s not just your personal statement that is sent to them. There’s also the rest of your UCAS application, which includes a reference from your school or sixth form, and a full transcript of your academic record. It’ll tell the admissions officer about all the grades you have acquired over the years, and contextualise them with the school you went to and the area you grew up in. For this reason, you don’t need to flaunt your past grades (or your target grades for the future) in your personal statement. If you got an A in your Maths GCSE – or 7/8/9 for those studying under the new system – which will suggest your suitability for a Maths degree, then the admissions staff will already know. Don’t waste valuable space by inserting each grade you’re proud of one-by-one and the circumstances in which you achieved them. You’ll only be repeating yourself.

2 The ‘academic versus non-academic’ split … Remember that this is an essay proving your academic ability and aptness for a particular academic programme. I’m repeating the word academic here intentionally, because it truly is the most important thing to focus on. With this in mind, your personal statement should be at least 70 per cent focused on your scholarly ability, insights and flare. Basically, talk about your subject and why it fascinates you. What areas are you most intrigued by? How have you researched the subject outside of the standard curriculum? What are you hoping to investigate further? Remember that the people running your course care so much about the subject and will be salivating at the thought of someone excited to scuba-dive into it. For top universities, I’d recommend taking this one step further and making your statement at least 80 per cent academic, if not more. Also, if things haven’t gone to plan in the past – for example, if your GCSE results weren’t quite what you’d hoped for – this could be a great place to explain why this was the case, and, most importantly, how you’ve developed since.

3 How to talk about extra-curricular activities: Okay, so you play for a hockey team, have a bronze Duke of Edinburgh Award and used to babysit your neighbour’s cat once a month, but does that really make a university want you? The answer isn’t actually a straightforward no. You can use all of these things to your advantage by linking them back to your degree. As an example, I used the final paragraph of my personal statement to share some extra-curricular activities I’d partaken in, which could be utilised to prove my interest in the subject and assimilated with the rest of the essay, rather than being slapped on at the end. This section should be like the air freshener placed in your vehicle after a car wash, tying the whole thing together and packing that final citrusy punch. For example, when applying for an English Literature degree, I chose to focus on the use of language in novels, particularly psychoanalytical and feminist ones. Then, when I spoke about my extra-curriculars, I continued to discuss language, explaining how I had to alter my word choices, tone and sentence structure when addressing the children in the library I volunteered at, my peers in my role as Head Boy of my school and the audience of my online blog. When I played for a football team for ten years, I communicated with my teammates in a very different way to how I addressed customers in my part-time retail job. This was essentially a bedazzled list of my interests and achievements outside of the education system, adorned with references back to my interest in the subject I wished to study. Always, always, always link it back to the degree!