Applying to University: An Alternative Perspective

Life is full of important decisions.

In Year 10 you decide what subjects to take at GCSE. Once you get your GCSE results you have to decide what A levels to do and then, just when you’ve settled into Sixth Form life, there comes a period of time where you have to make more (potentially life changing) decisions than you’ve ever had to make before.

You’ll know when it’s drawing near. You start to hear the word (well technically it’s an acronym) U.C.A.S. a lot, strange people come into the school to talk to you about ‘Student Finance’ and ‘Open Days’ become an acceptable excuse for having days off school.  (Some people take this a little too far and start spending so much time at various universities that you begin to wonder than they have already been accepted onto a course!)

Depending on what school you go to, you may have to attend a career fair (a rather misleading title considering it is mainly universities that exhibit). These are events where universities try and sell themselves to you. The ones with the best freebies are usually the ones that manage to get rid of their prospectuses first and you come away laden with bags full of the dam things, most of which will never see the light of day again but which you picked up because that stall was giving out particularly nice free pens, and you felt obliged to feign interest.

It is during this initial period that you have to make your first important decision. What do you want to study? If, like me, you are not one of those fortunate people who have always known what they want to do when they ‘grow up’, this is not an easy task.

Personally (and after much consideration) I decided that my future lay in Biology. However, you would not believe the number of different biological courses that exist. Biology, Biosciences, Biomedical sciences, Biochemistry, Biochemical sciences, Natural Sciences (biological), the list goes on. Despite much research into the topic, I’m still no nearer to discovering the differences between a lot of these subjects but nevertheless, I decided on the latter.

So, Natural Sciences (Biological) it was. Now surely I just had to find the universities that did that course and I would be sorted. Alas this was not the case. It turns out that very few universities do this course and that it varies a huge amount between the ones that do. By the time I had narrowed down my search, the ‘Open Days’ had begun in earnest.