Narrow down clearing offers

Date: 17/08/2003

From my first clearing list I decided there were three places I was interested in

I now had some clearing offers in hand, so some of the panic was over and I could think about where I actually wanted to go. This was a similar step to the Look at some university websites and prospectuses earlier on in my diary. I did pretty much the same thing, look at the universities websites and prospectuses online, and see what I thought.

I also complied second clearing list listing places where I had offers or had been accepted to with useful information about the universities and courses. In clearing I ended up scribbling down a lot of university phone numbers and little bits of information about them so I compiled a second list of clearing places which would need to we whittled down to find two or three places I was interested in.

Firstly I disregarded some of the places I thought were a bit too far away for me or places I didn't really want to go such as Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield or Edinburgh. Then I decided to rule out places for which I thought about taking a different course there (Birmingham and Kings). I also ruled out places in London because it would be hard to find accommodation at this late stage (Queen Mary and Kings).

This basically left three places Reading, Southampton and Essex. They were all pretty good universities, Southampton was probably the best as it was in the Russell group, Essex came out pretty well in league tables but reading was generally good too. I looked at the websites for each of these three universities and they all seemed like nice places. Both Reading and Essex had open days on this week so I thought I would go along to at least one of them and get a feel for the place.