Apply for clearing offers

Date: 16/08/2003

Time to see what's available in clearing

I now started contacting universities on my initial clearing list, to see if they could offer me places. The first universities I contacted were the ones where it was possible to register interest or apply for courses online. This included Liverpool University, Kings College London and a couple of others. These pages were pretty simple to use. I just typed in the course I was interested it, my A-level and GCSE grade and contact details and waited to see if I got an offer or not.

For most of the other universities I needed to phone them up. In most cases I phoned up the universities clearing hotline and said what course I was interested in and what grades I got in my A-levels. Then depending on the university I would either be offered a place the and then or get passed onto the department responsible for that course (usually the economics or maths department).

At this point the clearing process got a little difficult, some universities, such as reading offered me a place outright. I didn't even have to decide whether to accept it then or not, the guy I spoke to said I had a place if I wanted, and would put some information in the post. Other universities were not so easy: Liverpool and Manchester both offered me places, but gave me a deadline of two and three days to accept them. Places like Southampton were worse still, they said they would consider offering me a place, but wouldn't make a formal offer, I would have to send of my clearing form and hope it got there in time if I wanted to apply there.

I have covered a few of the universities here, but spoke and got some kind of response from all of those mentioned on my initial clearing list.

Liverpool - Offered a place to do economics and maths
Kings - Offered a place to do computer science
Queen Mary London - Offered a place economics and maths
Sheffield - Offered a place economics and maths
Birmingham - Possibly accepted to do computer science
York - No course I wanted to do
Edinburgh - Decided it was too far away
Nottingham - No course I wanted to do
Brookes - No course I wanted to do
Bath - No course I wanted to do
Reading - Accepted to do economics and maths
Manchester - Accepted to do economics and maths
Liverpool - Accepted to do economics and maths
Southampton - Possibly accepted to do economics and maths
Royal Holloway - Didn't bother to contact, as I had some offers already
Essex - Offered a place economics and maths

Now I had been accepted to some places and had offers at others, it was time to do some research and decide where I wanted to go.