To apply to UK, you need to have a UCAS online account, as well as your school’s buzz-pass, which the college counselor will provide. For every other school in UK (I think), all you need to do is to fill up the UCAS form, choose the school, and click submit.
Except, of course, for Oxbridge. Personally, I applied to Cambridge, so I will do a write-up later on applying there. As you should know by now if you are applying this year, you may only apply to either Oxford or Cambridge to do an undergraduate degree, not both. Oxford and Cambridge are traditionally the most sought after schools in the UK, so you can imagine why they have this policy, especially considering that they have a more detailed selection process for candidates.
The UCAS form has several sections. The “Personal details’ one is quite self explanatory, except for the “Date of first entry to UK”. If you have been to UK before, write… the date which you entered it. Otherwise, put the approximate date of entry into the UK if you were to matriculate into the college of your choice which has the earliest starting date (you may choose five colleges to apply to).
For the Residential category, put ‘other’ if you are a non EU member like me. And before I forget, in the section where you register your name, there’s this drop down list where you can choose your title. There’s a huge selection of titles to choose from, including titles such as ‘Lord’, ‘Lady’, ‘Prince’, ‘Your Royal Highness’, ‘Admiral’, etc. As the college counselor told us at the briefing last year, choose ‘Mr’ if you are male, ‘Ms’ or ‘Miss’ if you are female (I assume you are unmarried here), or good luck with trying to get in!
For the ‘Student Support’ category, choose ’09 Overseas Agency; if you are planning to pay your way through college by getting a scholarship from some Singapore government agency like me, or the title which best describes your financial plans.
“Nominated access”: This is what you put in case UCAS has urgent need to contact you but is unable to for some reason. Your nominee will receive the information on your behalf and pass it to you, so put a family member or school staff member you know will be willing to do this for you.
For “My choices”, I choose:
1. University of Bristol; Mathematics with Physics
2. University of Cambridge, Churchill College, Mathematics
3. Imperial College London; Physics with Theoretical Physics
4. University College London (University of London); Mathematics with Mathematical Physics
5. The University of Warwick; Mathematics with Physics.
For “courses”, you can choose up to five different courses, but do not choose courses which are too radically different from each other as you cannot modify your application to suit each college on UCAS. For US applications, however, this is possible. My courses, while different, allowed me to talk about why I wanted to study Mathematics and/ or Physics, which are quite closely interlinked anyway. What I am saying is do not ask to apply for PPE in Oxford but Chemical Engineering in Imperial College, or you will have to sacrifice something when writing your UCAS essay – to write about why you want to do PPE or why you wish to study Chemical Engineering?
In all choices, I said I did not want to live at home (impossible for me when my permanent address is in Singapore) and did not wish to defer entry. Guys should list differently from me on whether they wish to defer entry or not. Even if you are only interested in applying to say, Oxford, I’ll advice selecting four more colleges to apply to anyway, since you are going to pay the same amount for the application even if you only applied to Oxford alone. It’s always advisable to apply to more than fewer schools due to the uncertainty inherent in college applications in any case.
Education: List everything that gives you bragging rights here. If it’s not listed in the drop down list of qualifications, put if under “Other (International Non-EU Qualifications)”. If you are unsure which school to list them under, put it under NUS High, or the school you were studying in when you earned that qualification. For example, if I got Silver in the Singapore Chemistry Olympiad in 2008, the drop down list does not have such a qualification. So what I did was list in under “National University of Singapore”, under “Other (International Non-EU Qualifications)”, and type the name of the competition and the results I obtained there.
When you want to list you NUS High Results, list the average CAPs you have attained so far. When you apply to UCAS, you likely have not got your NUS High Diploma yet.
“Employment” If you have not held a paid job before, check the box but leave the section blank. Most Singaporeans are not employed at this time in their lives, so don’t worry too much about leaving the section blank. If you are already in NS by the time you apply, presumably you can list this fact down here.
“Personal Statement”: I’ve already uploaded the personal statement I wrote when I applied, as did Ying Zhen, so go have a look if you want examples on how to craft it. UCAS gives guidelines on how to write a personal statement here: http://www.ucas.ac.uk/students/applying/howtoapply/personalstatement/ Please type your personal statement separately and review it before uploading to UCAS, since the system has a timer which will log you out if you are inactive on a UCAS page for too long. The UCAS website also states “You can enter up to 4000 characters (this includes spaces) or 47 lines of text (this includes blank lines), whichever comes first.” So mind you be careful of how much you write as you go along, or you’ll have to do some serious editing when you try to upload your essay. The system will warn you if your essay is over the character limit when you upload your essay.
After everything is done and you are happy, click “submit”. If you truly made a horrible mistake in your application, you can ask the college counselor to “return application to applicant” on his side, but please try not to do that too often as it will inconvenience the counselors.
Referees: You must ask one referee (likely your school teacher) to submit a writeup about you, also not more than 4000 characters with spaces or 47 lines of text long. You can send the application online to your referee. The referee can submit their portion online or ask the college counselor to input it for them.
After you “submit”, you have to pay a fee. See this page for the details. http://www.ucas.ac.uk/students/applying/howtoapply/cost It’s not very expensive, certainly less than the cost of applying to Oxbridge or the US.
I sent in my application in early September due to the early Cambridge deadline for international students. UCL was the first college to accept me, one month later.
When a college makes a decision about you, UCAS will automatically send you an email to inform you of the status change. To see what has happened, follow the instructions given in the email to login to UCAS Track to check your status. I got an unconditional offer from UCL. If you have been offered a place, usually the college will send you a package containing information on them and the course you choose.
Bristol was the next college to accept me. It was a conditional offer. I was asked to get CAP > 4.00, which I fulfilled, and also a score of > 6.5 for all components in the IETLS, which I eventually decided not to fulfill. The IETLS is like the UK version of the TOEFL.
In around November I was called for interviews and test for my Cambridge application, which I will write about separately. Sometime after that, I was given a letter from Cambridge asking me to sign a release form for my application to be sent to all Cambridge colleges for review in the event I was pooled. (I guess I should have figured out I had been pooled then.)
In the second week of January, the Western world reopened after the Christmas break. I got an email saying I had been pooled into Newnham College. The formal letter took a couple more weeks to come, and I realized I gotten a conditional offer: I had to achieve grade I or higher for STEP II and III, and score > 7.0 or above for all components of the IETLS.
Imperial College gave me an unconditional offer in around February or March. Warwick I think was the last to reach a decision. I got an unconditional offer from both schools. Once all my colleges had reached a decision, I was told to reply to my offers no later the 7 June, 2010.
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