 Hi there, I'm Kim and I'll be taking you through a short presentation on making a UCAS application. In terms of what we'll go through in this presentation, we'll look at the application timeline, the application process, personal statements, and what happens after submission. Some key facts around UCAS. So UCAS is a completely online application and it's centralized, so you'll be able to access all UK universities through UCAS. You have a maximum of five choices, so that could be at five different universities or it could be multiple choices at multiple universities. There are some restrictions, so if you are looking to apply for medicine, veterinary science or dentistry, you can only apply to a maximum of four courses in any given year, but you could use that fifth choice in a different area. And also if you're applying to Oxford or Cambridge, you can only apply to either one of those in any year. In terms of the application cost, it's £20 for one choice or £26 if you're looking at applying to between two and five universities. There is what we call equal consideration and invisibility. So this means where if you get your application in by the appropriate deadlines, you will be considered by each and every university. And invisibility means that we only see your application to us, so we base our decision based on your background and based on our individual university requirements. In terms of decisions, you will have one of unconditional, conditional, unsuccessful. Unconditional means you already have all of your results and you meet the university's requirements. Conditional might mean that you're awaiting your results. And unsuccessful is unfortunately where a university feels that you do not meet their entry requirements. In terms of the application and timeline, there's quite a few different deadlines, so I'll go through these with you. So in terms of the deadlines, the early course deadline is for medicine, veterinary science and dentistry and also Oxford and Cambridge or the 15th of October. The usual UCAS application deadline is the 15th of January, though this was pushed back this year to the 26th of January. You also can make applications up to the 30th of June. So the final UCAS application date is the 30th of June, but if you want to be having the equal consideration and also just from a process of giving universities a bit more time to look at your application and also giving yourself more time to look at the university choices, then I would make the application by the earlier deadline of the 26th of January if you can do. In terms of university's decision, if you make your application by the 26th of January, then they will respond to you by the 19th of May, and then you have until the 9th of June to declare your firm or insurance choice. And with that, obviously if you've applied later, there are some later deadlines that come into play. Other dates that you might want to consider is UCAS extra, so if for any reason you decide after you've made your first five choices that those choices are no longer valid for you, then you can make a UCAS extra application and have one more choice. And then if it gets to results and you've either achieved better than you thought you were going to achieve or maybe not as good as you thought you might achieve, then there is also UCAS clearing which gives you another option to apply to UK universities that year. So just to go again over some of these deadlines, the 15th of October as I said is the earlier deadline, the 26th of January is the deadline for equal consideration. There is UCAS extra that falls between February and July, and the 9th of June if you've received all of your results by the 19th of May in terms of which universities will make you offers, then you can reply to those by the 9th of June so choosing your firm or your insurance. And as I say the 30th of June is the last date to submit a application before clearing. In terms of things that you might want to think about, is you do need to consider the subject, the course content, the structure, the study style, the entry requirements. Are there any additional entry requirements, such as the ELNA, if you're looking at taking a law program, or if you need a certain level of GCSE or a level master take a program, you might want to consider those. You also need to think about the location and the size of the university and how you will cope in that environment so think about campus versus city. Think about a big student population versus a small student population, think about transport links, accommodation, finances, and also extracurricular activities that you might want to take. In terms of the initial research and where to look, you can look at universities own websites, you can look at UCAS, that's a great website for getting an overview of lots of different universities, and you can also build a short list on UCAS by selecting which program you're looking to apply to and then it will provide you with all of the universities that offer that program. You can also look at websites such as UniStats, which will give you again a bit more of a comparison of different universities moving forward. You can also look at the social media reach institution, and that's really good to do because often with the social media sites there's a lot of student engagement so you can see what the current students feel about their time at any particular university is what things they particularly like about their university, possibly see a day in the life of. You can also talk to your school councillors and your careers advisory service at your schools and thinking about what you want to do in the future and how your university degree will help you to get there. You can attend UCAS exhibitions, open days that universities hold, virtual open days, subject taster sessions and webinars, and much like you're doing today you'll see that there's lots of different resources that are available to you. You can speak to current students so you can do this through the student room or you could do it through the university's own websites, a lot of them have got a chat to a student option where you can see kind of again what current students feel about their programs and about their decision and also looking back at their UCAS application, if they would have done anything differently in terms of their initial application. You can also look at student videos blogs and case studies to get a bit more of an overview. In terms of the application process itself as I said you do this all through UCAS. And the first part of the UCAS application is filling in your details. It's a 20 minute process of doing that and it should be quite simple for you. So you need to put in your personal details. And then next you'll be putting in your choices so which programs and universities do you want to apply to. You would then fill in a section about your education to date so it's what qualifications and results you've already achieved, and what results you're looking to receive this year. You can put in your personal details around employment so again if you've had any relevant work experience, and you think that would add to your application, you can put that in there as well. You then have your personal statement which I'll be touching on in more detail later, and also a reference which is somebody from your current school it could be a teacher it could be a counselor who would speak to your academic ability and also to the course that you're applying to. You just need to check everything and pay and send that through. In terms of the personal statement, and this is one of the most important parts of the application because you're telling us about yourself. So in this personal statement, it will be one personal statement for all of your choices. However, if you are applying, say to three programs for law but you're also thinking to apply to a couple of programs for business studies. What you can do is contact the universities that you're applying to say for the business studies program and ask them if they'll accept a supplementary statement via email, and that way that you can then tailor that statement to business studies, but have the law personal statement on your UCAS application which is the programs that you're applying to most so it's the three programs out of five example. This is the personal statement is a maximum of 4000 characters which is about 47 lines, and it's a chance to explain your motivations to the admissions tutor and staff. So why you're applying to this course what interests you about this chosen subject, what academic achievements you have past and present, and what career aspirations you have for the future. You can also put in there any work any volunteering any other experience that you gained that you think are relevant to the subject, and what skill sets you gain from these experiences. So it's really important to keep kind of returning back to anything that you mentioned in the personal statement how that's going to really prepare you for this program, and how this adds to kind of what you're looking to do in the future and your future aspirations. So other things to know about the personal statement is that you should avoid naming specific universities within your personal statement because it is going to go up to all five choices. So if you say, I've always wanted to study at SOAS University of London. That's great for me to hear because I work at SOAS but it may alienate your other choices. So if you try to be too funny or to use too elaborate language or use things that are very cliche. That is often picked up a lot by the readers, they just really want an honest statement about why you're looking to study that particular program and why you want to study it at the choices that you submitted. Again, with the fact that you're trying to make your personal statement hit home with every university, that's also part of that initial research where when you are applying to universities, say you're applying to a law program, you should be looking at law schools which approach law in the same way. So keep it concise and use your own style. And UCAS does have a service where it looks at all personal statements. And so it will detect if personal statements have a tool been plagiarized. So it's really, really important that it's in your own words. And then the advice is to draft it to edit it and to revise it. Also ask others to have a look at it. So ask your teachers to have a look at it, ask your parents to have a look at it, maybe ask your friends to have a look at it. There may be something that you haven't mentioned in your personal statement that they think is really, really key. And they will be able to give you some advice on that. So it's always good to have a second eye. Because of after submission, you should be patient as response times will vary depending on university and depending on course you're applying to your application won't be rejected if it's incomplete. Each university will normally contact you if there's anything else they think they require. And it's supplementary information by email. So after you've applied through UCAS, if you feel that there was nowhere for you to provide additional information or you later want to provide more information you can do this through email. A good example of that is if you are an international student and you're taking a range of different qualifications. Sometimes there's only room for you to enter in some of the information. And you might want to send in a more detailed transcript to through to the university afterwards. So as we don't interview very often only in rare cases, but you should consider that for maybe some of the other universities and some of the other programs that you might be applying to. And some universities may operate a gathered field approach. This is particularly true for things like medicine dentistry inventory, where they may wait until they have a certain number of applications through and are looking at those students in comparison to each other. So as we don't do that we have rolling admissions so as soon as the application comes in we are reviewing. So in terms of your applies and our applies to you. As I said before we do have unconditional responses conditional and unsuccessful so an unconditional offer would mean that you have showcased that you meet all of the requirements that we have, and that you have all of your results already. So the conditional would be where you look like you meet the requirements or will meet the requirements of our programs but you don't have your final results yet. And unsuccessful as I said unfortunately is where the university feels that you won't meet their entry requirements. So you should wait for all decisions from all choices, and then make your family insurance decisions. And it's not a bad thing to reach out to university so say you have received all of your decisions. Bar one, then you could reach out to that university and just ask them if you are able to get that in order to move forward with your firm or your insurance choices. The firm choice is where, if you meet all conditions, that's where you replace so it's kind of your, your first choice, and your insurance choice is your backup option. So it's usually good to have this as slightly lower in conditions from your firm offer, unless you're really really sure that you're going to meet the firm and the insurance offer. And then all other offers will need to be declined. There is also a 14 day cooling off period so once you've made the decision on which is your firm and your insurance choice, if you then decide that those are no longer the choices you want to make and you wanted to select one of the other choices that you have, then you do have that 14 day period to make that change. In terms of other options as I said you have UCAS extra, which falls between the 11th of February and the 4th of July. And if you used all five choices and had no offers or you've drastically changed what you're looking at, then you can look to apply through UCAS extra for one final choice. You have clearing which is after the 30th of June if you've received no offers or declined all your offers or you've not met your conditions. Then you can look for clearing places and adjustment would be where you are placed with a firm choice that you did better than you expected from your original offers. And so you want to look to find another university, which maybe at higher entry levels. Then you thought you were going to achieve. So just a review of all of the application process. You need to research and choose your choice, your courses carefully. You should register online with UCAS in order to apply, you need to complete the application and process the payment. Your reference name will be added by the center by an independent referee. We'll send your application electronically to UCAS. UCAS will then process the application and send it out to your chosen universities. Universities will review the application that you submitted and make decisions. So either make you a unconditional offer, a conditional offer, or advise you that you've been unsuccessful. You will then be able to view all of the offers in your UCAS track account, and you can then reply to the offers, say making your firm and insurance choices. And then lastly, that means that when your results come in, as long as you have met all of the conditions of either your firm or your insurance choice, your place will be confirmed. So that's all the information there, but if you have any further questions, you can find some resources here to contact us. And to ask us any queries you may have around our courses, around the application process around how we review you as an institution, and any other queries that you might have. Thank you for joining us today.