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.

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.