 Hello, everybody. Welcome to today's webinar by SOAS, University of London. Today we'll be looking at the application process specifically for prospective undergraduate students. My name's Dan. I work in the UK student recruitment team at SOAS, and I'm joined today by two of my colleagues, Laura and Lisa. They'll be in the background answering any of your questions that you submit in the question box. And then Laura will also join me to answer any Q&A live at the end as well. So as we do go through today's session, please do feel free to pop any questions that you've got into the Q&A in the question box. And they can be addressed as we go on. And as I say, there'll be a little bit of time spare as well at the end for those. I thought it might be a good idea just to begin by showing you some of the key subject areas of focus at SOAS. As a university, we're internationally recognised for our expertise in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. These different regions of the world, often termed together as the global south, are where lots of our different courses draw inspiration and focus from in their teaching and research as well. So you'll see some courses on here which are regionally focused. So you might see countries or areas of the world listed. There might be regional studies and language studies, which is quite common for these subjects. But then you'll also see other different discipline subject listed as well. Things such as economics, history, law. And then again, these subjects are all teaching you about the discipline, learning that subject. But again, lots of the content and the materials and the content that you'll be covering in your lessons will be derived from the global south. So it's a fairly unique perspective and something that I think is incredibly valuable and exciting that SOAS offers, which does make us stand out a little bit from some of the other universities that are out there. But if you are attending this webinar today, I'd imagine that you might be slightly familiar with us already. You've done a bit of research perhaps. But if you are still in that research phase and you're looking to decide which subject you want to study, I'd really recommend having a look at our websites. You can find each of the subject areas on the website. And then within those subject areas, the specific degrees that are available as well. There are a whole variety of different degrees. And with all of our single and joint honours programs combined, I think there's over at 250 different options for you at undergraduate level. So that really is fantastic. There's a lot of choice there. So it's worth spending a bit of time doing some research even before you start thinking about making your application, just to find out what you think would be best for you. You may also find that you want to have some preparation before going straight into a full undergraduate degree. We do offer two foundation years, which are out there as well. The first of which is business management, law and economics. And the second is social sciences, arts, humanities foundation. Both of those courses are geared up to ensure that students who complete those programs are guaranteed progression onto any of our undergraduate courses as well. So if you do find that maybe you need a bit more support there, perhaps in terms of grades and entry requirements. And we'll talk more about entry requirements later on. But it might be worth thinking about one of those foundation programs as well. So recognize that there's likely students who are currently completing their applications at the moment for 2022 entry for this year in autumn. But then we may also be joined by some students who are applying for 2023. So for next year, the majority of the dates that are used today are talking about this year. However, there are a couple of the ones which have been made available by UCAS already for 23 entries. So they may also be listed on some of the slides and I'll try to highlight them where they're available. But when it comes to dates, most of them will be in reference to this year. However, often they're roughly similar year on year. So to get started, I think it's important to look at how you first actually begin with your application. When you apply to university, you make one application which is sent to all of the different universities that you choose to apply to. So this is a centralized application and it goes through a platform called UCAS which you may or may not already be familiar with depending on where you're at in your journey. So you go to the UCAS website and register, confirm the year that you're looking to start and select that you're interested in undergraduate study. You may see some other options on there, but undergraduate study is the sort of regular degree that you'll be looking to go into. This will then take you through to the UCAS hub and you can think of that as a dashboard or as a sort of one stop shop with all of the key information that you need for your undergraduate application. So that will look a little bit like this in terms of some of the buttons that you might see. You'll go through and find the section where it says your applications and this is where you'll start the actual application itself. When you begin this application, you will be asked whether you're applying from a school, college or centre. If you are applying from one of these, it's important to clarify yes as you'll then be given the opportunity to add a buzzword. This is something that would have been provided to you by your school, college or centre that you're applying from. The reason that you'll use this is it links your application to that institution. So this means that then someone from that institution, often a nominated UCAS advisor, maybe your personal tutor, will then have access to your application and they can do stuff like submit a reference. And this can also be really important for your own internal school deadlines if you have any of those. If you don't know that buzzword at the moment, you can add this at a later date, but just remember to do so as it is quite important there for tracking your application. UCAS have worked on simplifying the application process over the last couple of years. So there are now four main sections which you need to be focusing on. The first is your choices, then you have your profile, your personal statements and the reference. And that reference is what I was just talking about there, that your teacher or someone from your institution is able to submit. So this is what the one of the first sections looks like and this is your profile. This is all of the general information about you and this builds up an understanding for universities as to who you are. It's really important to complete all of the details in your application. Universities will then be able to use this to make sure that they are addressing you correctly and contacting you in the right manner. They'll be able to use this information to make you an appropriate offer as well. And in many instances, this will begin the basis of your student record for when you start at a university as well. Fortunately, you can actually save this at any point, so you don't have to complete all of this in one go. You can take your time and I would recommend that you do so. If you need to ask for any support from parents or supporters in making sure that you have this information accurately recorded, then you can do that and you can come back to it at a later date. Some of the pieces of information which you will submit are what we might describe as protected information. So this is stuff that relates to diversity, inclusion, for example. This will only be provided to universities once you have a place or your application has been archived. So what that means in short is that universities cannot take that information into account when they're making a decision or the offer making stage. So that information is protected and only released to them later on in the process. There are a variety of different pieces of information which you might need to submit and these will vary depending on your status, particularly whether you're a home student or an overseas students as well. You may be asked about your residency status. So where possible, if you do need to seek any advice about that, there's some information on our website. So you can know what you need to put in there. You can also include information about your education so far. This is looking at all of the qualifications that you've taken since roughly GCSE or equivalent. You can also fill out the section about employment, so covering any paid jobs that you've had. Note this is just paid jobs and you don't need to include voluntary work in this section. And after you filled in all of this information and you're happy that you have it ready, you can then move on to this section here. So this is about your choices. Hopefully before you reach this, you'll have spent some time researching universities having a look through their websites. As I was mentioning earlier is a really good idea to do looking at the subjects that are available, thinking about what you might want to study and what really appeals to you. If you've done this and you've got a list of subjects ready, you can then add your choices into this part of your UCAS application. You use the big blue button there that says add choice. And this will bring up a form which you can see on the left hand side and that's a auto-populating list. So as you start typing in, it will bring up all of the relevant options for you. And you can select the courses you're interested in studying and at which universities you would like to study. You can submit up to five choices. You don't have to submit all five though. You can only choose one if you would like. This could be at five different universities or you could make five choices for one university. So it really is up to you how you make those choices there. With something that you might want to bear in mind and this is particularly important for a university such as ours where we have lots of different joint honours courses available. An example I've got on the screen is for history and global development. Just because you see both subjects there, as history leads in that title, it doesn't mean that it's like a major subject. It's not the majority of what you'll be studying. It's 50-50 in terms of the title of the degree. Once you then start at university, you'll then be the option through the modules that you select in your first, second and final years to customise the weighting towards each of those subjects. But you don't need to worry about which way around that degree title is written. If you are applying for a joint honours, just so long as both of the subjects are in the name of the course that you're submitting there. Then you move on to those final two blocks, the personal statement. I'll go into some further information about this on the next slides. Then also your reference as well. The references, what I've already mentioned, for those of you applying from school, centres or institutions, this is often from a teacher or an academic and they are able to use this opportunity to give some more information about you. They're trained in how to write one of these references and then they know what universities are looking for as well. For some students, some applicants, you might have been out of education for a period of time. So if you've been out of education for over three years, then we can accept a professional reference similar to applying for a job. So moving on to personal statements. This is a really big part of your application. There's lots of information on the screen now and on the next couple of slides and that's because it is probably the most important part of your application. You're using this opportunity to tell us about you in your own words. So this is really a unique part of the personal statements. The personal statement that you submit will be sent to all of your university choices. So that could be up to five different universities. So it's important that the information that you're using and the statement you write is about yourself and is geared towards the subjects that you're interested in, but it's applicable in most cases to more than one university. The amount of content that you can write is capped at 4,000 characters, which usually is roughly about 500 words. It's actually not very much or 47 lines of text. So it's whichever of those you hit first, 4,000 characters or 47 lines of text. And that's determined by the personal statement box in which you submit this information on your application. In your personal statement, lots of people do struggle to actually understand what they need to include in there. They want to know what universities are looking for. So I put four key bullet points here that I think you should be trying to address in your personal statements. Ultimately, you're using this opportunity to explain why you are applying for the course. And you should definitely be highlighting your interests about that relate to your subject. So think about why you're interested in this course. Where did that come from? What have you done to develop that interest and to research and explore it further? You can include some information about academic achievements that are relevant. That can be from the past and from the present. Think about the skills that you've gained from them and what sorts of benefits that they've supported you with. And finally, I think it can also be nice to think about what you will do with your degree. So this could be career aspirations or related to how you think your degree will help you in the future as well. This isn't something that is mandatory to add in, but I think it just shows some forward thinking. It demonstrates to the admission tutors who are reading your application. You've really put some thought into what you want to accomplish from this degree. It is going to be three or four years of your life. So we want to know that you're ready for it and that you're being proactive in how you're thinking and approaching this. You can also think about any skills and experiences that you've had relating to work or volunteering. Any of your hobbies and interests as well. It could be that you've been able to gain some different skills from these, which are also able to be related to the course and your application as well. So there are a few other things that you might want to note in your personal statement. And these are, I guess, a couple of top tips. So I would avoid naming specific universities if you're applying to more than one university, as this can alienate your other choices. They might be a little bit put off to see another university named. I would avoid using elaborate language and cliches. If anything, it's best that you write in your own style. So keep it concise. Keep it fairly simple as well. It's more important that you effectively communicate your ideas, your enthusiasm for the subject, than using the most flowery language as possible. Do remember that the people reading the personal statements have to read quite a lot of these. So for them, they're looking for someone who is a clear communicator and can articulate their points well. It's important to remember that the personal statement is put through some similarity detection software. This is called copy catch. That's the term used by UCAS. Basically, they're comparing the personal statement you submit with all other personal statements submitted, as well as some other key resources from around the web as well. The main idea here is just to make sure that you're using your own words. It's really important that you've not plagiarized and copied your personal statement from someone else because then it's not personal to you. So as long as you write in your own words, this will be absolutely fine. And I would say this last point here, although fairly small, is very important. With your personal statement, I would make a draft. I would edit that draft, read it through, edit it again, redraft it, make another draft. Spend plenty of time looking over what you've written. Read it out loud, ask some trusted people to support you with it as well. Excuse me, the slides just jump forward a little bit there. Spend that time. Yeah, ask someone who is trusted and who can support you there as they'll be able to help pick up any maybe mistakes or grammatical errors, which you might not necessarily pick up quite as quickly if you've been spending lots of time writing it. It can be easy to overlook things. So then you can submit your application. So once you've submitted your application, well, sorry, I should say to submit the application, you will be asked to pay an application fee. So if you just choose to submit to one university or one choice, sorry, this will be £20. If you make two to five choices or you submit your application after the 30th of June, this will be the full amount, which is £26.50. There are a few deadlines to be aware of, and the main UCAS deadline that applies for students who are applying to SOAS is the equal consideration deadline in January. But this year's entry for this September, that is 26th of January, 2022. The students who are applying for next year for 2023, that is set at the 25th of January, 2023. After you submit your application, there will be a 14-day calling off period. So if you do decide within those 14 days to rescind your application and to cancel and withdraw from your choices, then UCAS will be able to refund that money and withdraw your application if needed. So after you submit, I would say the main thing here is just to be patient. Universities will get back to you. It can take for us roughly four to six weeks, but as we get closer to those deadlines and the busier times of year, then this can take a little bit longer. So please just be patient. Once you have submitted it in UCAS and you can see it's submitted, a decision will be made or communicated with you. And I'll talk about those in a second. Once we receive your application, if we do find that it's sort of missing any information or there's anything else that we need to know, we will get in touch with you to ask for this. Something else that you can do is submit any supplementary information to us directly via email. Now, this is not something that's mandatory, but if, for example, you find that your personal statements wasn't able to address the particular course you're applying for at SOAS, say, for example, you're applying for geography for other universities, but you apply for global development while development at SOAS. And you find that you've not been able to write something unique enough that addresses the intricacies of the course you're applying for, then you can submit that supplementary information to us directly by email. But again, it's not something that's required. It's also worth knowing that we don't interview very often, only in a rare case will this sort of be required. So that's probably something you don't need to think about too much for us. And just to highlight how some universities go about making offers and decisions. Some do this as a gathered field approach so they receive all of their applications and then make offers, whereas others, similar to us, do it on a rolling basis as and when we receive them. So with your university decisions, those that come back to you will receive one of three decisions. This could be unconditional, conditional or unsuccessful. Unconditional means that you've been guaranteed a place. Conditional is that your place is conditional, is your place is reliant on something such as passing your exams. An unsuccessful means that we're not able to make you an offer. So once you've received all of those decisions, you can then decide which ones you wish to respond to. So you make a firm choice and you can also decide to make an insurance choice if you would like to. The firm choice is where you will be placed if you meet all of your conditions, such as passing the relevant exams that have been required of you. I'm sorry about the slides jumping forwards. The insurance choice is, I would recommend setting this to somewhere where it's got slightly lower entry requirements. And that's in case you don't meet the requirements for your firm choice. Now, you don't have to select an insurance. This is more if you're, yeah, this is if you maybe don't have an unconditional offer or you're not selecting the unconditional offer. For those students who do have an unconditional, they don't necessarily need to, well, they don't need to select an insurance. But it's there as a backup more for students who have got conditional offers. But most people where possible do try to submit them. You do have a couple of other options as well to take into account. So there is something called extra. This is if you have actually used up all five of your choices and you don't receive any offers. So that could be that you've been declined or you withdraw from all of them as well. Then one by one, you can submit an extra choice into UCAS for consideration by universities. So for this year, you have from the 25th of February to the 4th of July to do this. There's also clearing. You might have heard about this clearing technically opens in early July. But for most people, they'll start thinking about it when their results day takes place. This is for students who again might have received no offers or they've declined all of their other offers. Or they might not have met all of their conditions for entry. So you'll be able to search for vacancies and to add one of these in via your UCAS hub. So I thought it might just be a good idea as well to touch upon entry requirements for some of our courses. So I've only got a limited amount of space to talk about some of these here. There's a much wider range of entry requirements that we are able to consider. Quite popular qualifications that people might be studying such as A levels. We're asking for, depending on the subject, three A's to ABB or for IB looking for 37 points down to 33. If you are interested in one of those foundation years that I mentioned earlier, we'd be looking for much lower grades and this would be at three C's or 30 in the IB. As I say, other qualifications that we'll consider, there are some programs which have their own specific qualifications or they ask for something in addition such as maths GCSE or A level maths. And so that would be for stuff like our finance and management program or economics program as well. For things like BTECs, those qualifications will be reviewed as well in combination with GCSE profile. So again, we are looking at all of those different qualifications that you have. This information about entry requirements can also be found on our website. So I would encourage you to have a look on there if you're studying something that you don't see on here or if you want to find out the exact entry requirements for each of the courses. For joint programs and joint degrees, where you've got two subjects named, the subject with the higher entry requirements is what you will lead with. So for example, we've got politics and Japanese on here. That would be three A's and that's because politics as a single honours ask for three A's even though Japanese only ask for ABB. So if you were just applying for Japanese, it would be ABB but because it's in combination with politics which asks for a higher grade, it is that higher grade. As I mentioned about other UK qualifications, likewise we also accept a whole variety of different international qualifications and on our website we've got a big list where you can find your country and the qualifications that you might have been studying so you can then get a better idea as to what we're looking for there. If you do have any questions about that there, you can also get in touch with us and we can give you some further information about what we'll be looking for from your qualifications. Some further information that might be worthwhile considering is that we do also make contextualised offers and these are for students who we deem to have faced particular barriers in accessing higher education. Our admissions team are trained to support, they're trained to spot information in your application which sort of categorises you as being able to receive a contextualised offer so they've got their criteria and if they find that within your application then they're able to make you a lower offer so usually this will be one grade lower. We are also able to accept students who are looking to transfer in from another UK university. Students can transfer only up into their second year, they can't transfer beyond that so into third or final years. For students who are currently studying, for students who want to study an LLB law with us you have to be studying that exact programme at another university just due to how the entry requirements for that one work so that's something to bear in mind if anyone is considering, if anyone is currently a student at another university looking to transfer, let us know and we can give you some more information about how to go through with that. And it's also important to know that we will also consider mature students naturally but we recognise that mature students might have been out of education for a while or you might not quite meet the minimum entry requirements for the programme that you're looking to study. So with all of that in mind we might suggest that you take an access course or an access to higher education which could be relevant and that can be used perhaps in combination with work experience as well over a number of years to demonstrate your ability and suitability for the course that you're looking to apply to. I did touch upon English language requirements earlier in the presentation. This is for students who are overseas. If you're looking for direct entry onto one of our undergraduate courses then there are a few different tests which we can accept. One of the most common there being the IELTS academic. I've listed the scores for some of those most common ones. If you've got any questions and you want to find out about any of the tests which you might be looking to take and whether we can accept them I would check on our website and the link where you need to look is on our international students page and that web link is just at the bottom of the slide there. There are other ways in which you can demonstrate your English proficiency as well. I've just put two common examples but there are quite a few different things which you can use and that is if you're taking for example an A level or an IB subject in English due to the nature of that subject. But again consider what that qualification is and have a look on the websites for all of those different alternative qualifications which we might be able to accept. For students who do need to improve their English language abilities there are recessional and incessional courses which you might be asked to take and as well as those you might be interested in some of the other provisions offered by our foundation college. The first being the Access to English Language Studies programme which is an online sort of language training course which helps to prepare students who are looking to come and study at SOAS and that's really designed to bridge the gap between roughly a 4.5 in your IELTS to bring you up to a 5.5 and that will assist with gaining entry onto the ICC the International Foundation programme which is the next one on the screen. So the ICC is really for international students who have English as a second language or an additional language but they want to study an undergraduate degree so this is to bring your IELTS scores up from roughly a 5.5 up to the level that they're needed to be at for entry onto our undergraduate programmes. So these are both things which you might want to look for and if this is something that applies to you you can have a look on our website for more information about these. So I'm going to move on and talk briefly about fees and funding. There is another webinar which will be coming up which covers fees, funding, scholarships in much greater detail as well so I won't go into rooms of information right now just highlight some of the basics that you might need to know. If you are interested in that webinar I'll highlight the date for that at the end of these slides. So with tuition fees for undergraduate students who are home based currently each year is set at 9,250. For international students for this year has been set to 20,350 and for any of those students who are looking to go onto the International Foundation that programme that I've just mentioned that's currently set to 21,320. If you're unsure about whether you should be paying home or international fees then there is a fee status questionnaire which you can take and submit to our admissions team and that's available on the websites. I would say that with that if you are unsure you can proactively submit that to them but at the same time we will use the information that you provide in your UCAS application to make a sort of decision there but if you do think that the decision that's been made is incorrect again you can also submit that fee status questionnaire. So there are different means of which you might go about applying for some funding to support you throughout your studies. For home students you can apply for student finance and this comes in two different sections. The first is a tuition fee loan which covers all of your fees and then the second is a means tested loan which covers your maintenance costs. So this depends on household income and depending on how much your household income is depends on how much you're eligible to borrow for the means tested maintenance loan. So that's paid directly to you whereas the tuition fee loan is paid directly to the university that you're applying through. For students who are looking to study in London so at SOAS there is actually an increased amount in which you're able to borrow for the maintenance loan and that's just in recognition that sometimes London can be a bit more expensive than some other areas of the country. So that does make things a little bit easier for you hopefully. But overseas students this really depends on where you're applying from and where you're based. There's lots of different financial aid options which are available but these are often specific to the country that you're in or that you've got links to. So I've highlighted just a couple of popular ones there. US federal loans, Indian Cradella loans but there is there by no means the only things that are available. You will hopefully be able to have a little bit of information about this from your own research but you can also again look on our website under the fees and funding sections in the international sections to find out some of the other options and alternatives that might be out there depending on where you're from. And finally on funding I just want to touch upon sort of scholarships, awards, bursaries which might be available as well. There are a fairly limited number of these for students who are undergraduates so please don't necessarily think that you're going to be able to definitely rely on these but there are some awards that are out there so I did think it was worth just highlighting a couple of them and you can have a look at the website for a full list of these as well to get some more information. Two to highlight, one is the SOAS Sanctuary Scholarship. That's for a UK resident with limited leave to remain or similar status and there's full information about that on the website and that's a scholarship to cover fees but that's done by application. Whereas there is a SOAS bursary which is done by an automatic award or allocation. This is for students and is based on the new undergraduate students is based on financial need. So when you submit your UCAS application, there's a box to tick in which you can opt to share your financial details with the university you're applying to. If you do this the universities will then be able to make an assessment as to whether there's any additional financial support that they have available which you qualify for. So this is based for us, this is based on household income and a variety of other factors as well and there's a number of these bursaries which have been available. So that's a couple to highlight that have been available in the last couple of years. Hopefully we'll be going forwards. There are also some external funding opportunities as well with people that with companies and awarding bodies which we're aware of or have partnerships with. So I've listed a couple of these on the screen at the moment which you might like to explore further. Again as I say the website has got much more information than I can cover just in a couple of slides or you can join that fees and funding webinar as well in the future. So just before I cover the webinars there are also a number of open events coming up which I would really recommend no matter which part of your journey you're in in your application journey. The first is an undergraduate open day taking place online on Saturday 15th of January so that's coming up very soon. We then have an undergraduate taster day online. This is to give a more specific insight into what each subject is like and what it's like to study a particular subject. Whereas the open day will be more of an opportunity to meet academics, meet students and find out some other bits about SOAS as well. So there's two options which are fairly similar but do cover slightly different content. It's also the Global Challenges Forum which will be online. This is a great introduction into SOAS, into our research, the academics who are involved. This really highlights the multidisciplinary approach to research that we take. So I would recommend joining that as well if you're interested in that side of things. Then for students who have been able to apply, there is an undergraduate applicant day but this will only be available by email invitation. So this isn't something you can sign up for online. You will be emailed with an invitation to this if you're eligible to attend. This is a great opportunity especially for students who maybe haven't been able to visit SOAS so far. This will give you a day on campus finding out what it's like to study your subjects, meeting your peers, meeting academics and current students. So I would encourage you to come to that if you're eligible and you're holding an offer. And then finally as we move into the summer in June, we're hoping to hold our undergraduate open day on campus. And again that's an opportunity for people to come onto campus to find out more about life at SOAS. And that is more particularly aimed at students who are entering for 2023. For those events which are open for registration or to register your interests and more generally, you can visit our websites and the events section there. We'll have more information about each of those. And similarly in that area you'll also find some information about webinars and I've touched upon these a couple of times during this presentation. So upcoming we currently have a Careers Employability and Alumni webinar in the next couple of weeks in January. Then in early February there's the Feast Funding and Scholarships one which I've mentioned a couple of times. Towards the end of March there's an accommodation webinar so that's really helpful for any students who are currently applying to SOAS and will be shortly holding offers which is followed then by our Meet Our Students webinar. So find out from current students what life is like at SOAS. And then if you're an international student needing to apply for a student visa or a CAS, you'll be likely interested in our final webinar listed on the screen on the 28th of April. I would really encourage you to attend that one if that's relevant to you. There's some very important information and timelines which are highlighted in that. So again you can sign up for those online when you're ready. Most of those webinars run once or twice and where they are running, often you get two times lots to choose from on the days that they're running as well. So plenty of opportunities. And similar to this one, if you do sign up and can't attend in the end, it will be emailed out to you. So I would encourage you to have a look at some of those. Okay, and finally that brings us to the end. We do still have a little bit of time available. So I'll open up the questions box and see if we've got anything in there. And I'll invite Laura to join me as well. Hi everyone, my name is Laura. I also work in the student recruitment team. So I'm here with Dan to answer any questions that you have this afternoon. I think we've already got through quite a few of your questions. So if anybody does have any more questions that they still want to ask, do feel free to get those into us. Perhaps something that would be good to talk about. We often get asked about it is some of the sorts of things that you can include in your personal statement to sort of help yourself stand out. So obviously a personal statement is your main opportunity to promote yourself, to demonstrate your sort of suitability for the program. So some suggestions of things that you might want to include in your personal statement are why obviously you're interested in the subject, any relevant experience you have. So whether that's work experience or we know a lot of students don't have work experience and that's absolutely fine. Whether it might be sort of more general life experience and cultural experience that you want to draw upon. Any taster days or master classes that you attended, whether that's in person or whether that's online. Skills and qualities that you have and how you can sort of talk about the activities that you've done both academically and extracurricular and draw upon the skills that you've used in those activities and how they relate to the program. Any sort of personal achievements, gap year plans, career aspirations, any independent reading that you've done or any documentaries, podcasts you've listened to, any visits you've made to museums and galleries. All of these sorts of things are really useful things to include in a personal statement and you can use the ABC method. So that's activity, benefit and course. The activity you've done, the benefit of the activity that you've done and how that relates back to the course that you're applying for as well. So just some tips there as to what you can think about when you're writing a personal statement. Great, thanks Laura. There was a question that has been asked which it looks like Lisa answered. But I think it could be something which is really important actually for more people just to think about and it might be on the mind of others. So someone asked whether there, if their predicted grades are slightly lower than the entry requirements that we're asking for, is it worth them applying? Is there still a chance or an opportunity for them? And I would really still encourage you to make an application. We do understand that predicted grades aren't necessarily exactly what you will achieve on the day. We know that especially over the last couple of years as well things have been very difficult with the pandemic and COVID and everything that's happened there and how that's affected your education and yourselves. So we know that it's been a whole period of turbulence as well. So things might be a little bit all over the place, shall we say. But if you do find that even your predicted grades are slightly lower than the entry requirements, I would still encourage you to apply. The admissions team will review your application in its entirety. And even if they are slightly below, they might still decide to make you an offer. And this is then giving you the opportunity to hopefully perform to that level. If results day comes around and you still unfortunately miss the entry requirements, the admissions team do assess this again and see if there is any opportunity there. Sometimes naturally they won't be able to go through with that and enroll you. But I think in terms of actually that first point of actually making an application, it's good to aim high and to challenge yourself. And I would, if you are deciding to make five choices, then I would think about making two which are maybe slightly higher than your predicted grades. I'd probably make two which are on par or level with your predicted grades and then one which is a little bit lower. And that's more of like your backup choice as well. So that's how some people choose to structure it. But the short answer is that I think it's probably still worth giving it a go. Especially if you're really interested in studying that course and at university. So we've had a question from Pratima about the differences between the LLB from India and the LLB from SOS. So I'd say an LLB from India will be probably particularly suited towards the Indian legal system, whereas the SOS LLB covers English law. And so it's the qualifying law degree that will allow you to progress in the legal field in the UK. So I'd advise you to check to see if your qualification, whatever degree you choose to take will be accepted in the country where you're planning to go on to work after you graduate in the field of work that you're planning to go on to work in. So that'd be sort of the best advice I have about that one. So there's been a question about the personal statements that get submitted in UCAS and whether we need to enter line breaks between paragraphs as that will increase characters and increases the number of lines above 47 just putting a space being up to separate paragraphs. Yeah, so I'd encourage that, firstly, when you're writing a personal statement, and this isn't something that I explicitly touched upon, I'd probably first write it in a word processor of your choosing and structure it exactly how you need to, but be aware that when you then copy and paste that into the UCAS personal statement box, that will actually remove all of the formatting as well. And universities are very familiar with the lack of formatting that the personal statement box really allows. If you do have space and you can make some paragraph spacing, that is important where possible. It does make it a little bit easier to read, but I would be, it's more important that you are able to include the sort of number of characters that you're looking for. So if you find that once you've entered into that box, that paragraph spacing is a bit of an issue, maybe you'll find that doing some indentation or something like that works a little bit better for you. So yeah, that's probably what I would look at there. I think UCAS have also themselves got some really good information and guidance about this on their own website. So if you head to the UCAS website on the personal statement section, they cover things like this and they're obviously the experts on that. So I'd have a look there. We've had a question from Abdul Salam about what the average time frame is, which decision for an application will be sent back through UCAS. So it's asked that's between about four to six weeks. It can be longer or shorter than that, just depending on whether the application is complete when it's submitted and whether we need to ask you for any further information. And also just depending on the volume of applications at that particular time. So obviously we're approaching the UCAS deadline, which is the 26th of January. So it is a very busy period for our admissions team, but they will try to process those decisions as quickly as possible after the deadline as well. And they will be processed in the order in which they come into us as well. A question there about the senior status LLB program. The funding opportunities available for the program for international students. Laura, do you know much about the admissions criteria and the period for applying to the senior status LLB? So the senior status LLB program is applied through the usual UCAS application form. So the time frame for applying for that is very similar to all of the other undergraduate applications for other undergraduate programs at SOAS. It is slightly different in that you do need an undergraduate degree in a different or a similar area at undergraduate level before you then go on to take the senior status LLB program. So it's kind of a unique program at SOAS. What we'd be looking for is a 2-1 in your undergraduate degree to be able to apply to that one. In terms of funding opportunities available for the program, I'm not too sure. What we can do is we can go away and find out and get back to you and see if we can find out about funding opportunities for that one. It may be worth having a chat to the admissions tutor for the program. He can be found on the course page on the SOAS website with their contact details. They might be able to point you in the direction of any possible funding that they are aware of for that program. But as you do usually need an undergraduate degree to then be able to apply to the senior status LLB program, things like the UK student loans don't normally apply to that particular program. So it might be that you would need to find an alternative source of funding for that one. Great, thank you. I had a question about the application fee and if there's a waiver for this. I presume you mean the fee that you cash charge. I'm not aware personally of any waiver. Laura, if you do know of one, please do jump in. That's not something that I've personally come across before. So I think the answer to that is that no, that there isn't one. Do you have a couple more minutes? I think that's the end of the questions which have been submitted, but I'll just leave it for another few seconds for anyone who does have any more questions that they would like to ask. In the meantime, I'll just highlight the inquiries email address. If you do want to get in touch with us after this session is over, you can email us at study so ask.ac.uk. That is on the screen at the moment. And I've just popped it into the chat box as well. I've not seen any more questions come in. So I'll take that as hopefully that we've answered all of yours. Thank you everyone for attending and just say thank you to Laura and Lisa in the background for answering your questions as well as you went through. That does bring us to the end. I hope you've enjoyed the webinar and do remember that you can watch the recording back and that'll be sent out to you. Thank you very much.