Look at some university websites and prospectuses

Date: around 20/09/2002

By looking at universities as well as courses I am narrowing down my options

There were two ways I went about looking for a university. The first was to find out what universities offer the subjects I was interested in and see what they are like. The second was to decide what universities I would like to go to and then see if the offer courses similar to the ones I am looking for. I used a combination of these methods to find some universities and courses which I thought might fit me.

Take the second method first. I looked for some universities which I thought might be good for me. As I generally get high grades I looked at some of the universities in the Russell group.

Starting from this list I decided I didn't really want to travel too far away (I live in Oxford by the way) so excluded Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham and Newcastle. In decided I might consider applying to one of the Oxbridge universities (Oxford and Cambridge) and decided that if I did I would go for Oxford so this excluded Cambridge from my list leaving 12 universities left to look at, shown in the table below.

Now onto the second method, fining courses I liked the look of at universities. The set of courses I was interested in was shown on the Decide what I want to study page. Using the UCAS search by course option I was able to see what universities offered the courses I was interested in.

Once I had a list of courses I was interested in a universities I felt were about the right level for me I was able to put the two groups together to create the table below. It shows the 12 universities I had lest to choose from in the Russell group showing the subjects which they offered which I was interested in. Some of the universities show extra information in brackets. This shows the results I would need to get in and also the number of places offered compared to the number of applicants last year - giving me an idea of how easy it would be to get in, much of this information was collected from prospectuses in my school library.

University of Birmingham	Economics (86/575 BB) Mathematical Economics & Statistics (10/75 BB) Money, Banking and Finance (45/325 BB)
University of Bristol	Economics Economics and Accounting Economics and Econometrics Economics and Finance Economics and Management Economics and Mathematics (AAB)
Cardiff University	Banking and Finance Economics
University of Leeds	Economics (?/165 BBB, for all 3) Economics-Management Studies Economics-Mathematics
University of Oxford	Economics and Management (75/500? AAA)
University of Sheffield	Business Studies and Economics (?/160 BBB, for all 9) Economics Economics and Mathematics Economics and Statistics Economics with Econometrics Economics with mathematics and Statistics Economics with Mathematics and Statistics -(Economics) Economics with Mathematics and Statistics -(Mathematics) Economics with Mathematics and Statistics -(Statistics)
University of Southampton	Economics (10/89 BBB, for all 4) Economics and Econometrics Economics and Finance Economics and Management Sciences Economics and Mathematics
University of Warwick	Economics (AAB, for all 3) Mathematics and Economics Maths-Operational Research-Statistics-Economics
Imperial College	Mathematics with Statistics for Finance (?/200 AAB)
King's College London
London School of Economics	Economics (97/2190 ABB) Econometrics & Mathematical Economics (5/152 ABB) Mathematics and Economics (ABB 35/385)
University College London	Economics (24/100 AAB, for both) Economics and Statistics

Note that King's College doesn't offer a financial/economics course at all so that's one down. The rest of the universities all offer the kinds of courses I would be looking for.