Dealing With Offers
So the application and the Personal Statement go off to UCAS, by the appropriate deadline, and your child, hopefully, starts to get response letters from Universities.
There are three kinds of response:
- Unconditional offer: You already have the relevant qualifications and we will give you a place in English;
- Conditional offer: If you get three Bs we will give you a place in English;
- Rejection: We will not give you a place in English
Of course, if the unconditional offer is the place your child wants to go, that’s great. Job done.
More commonly, though, your child will nominate two offers: one as a firm choice, one as an insurance choice. Suppose University A says, ‘We will give you a place in English if you get a B and two Cs ’, and University B says ‘We will give you a place in English if you get three Bs’: your child might nominate University B as firm choice and nominate University A as insurance choice - in case he or she doesn’t get the grades.
(Your child need not nominate an insurance choice; but if he or she does so, and then gets the grades for it while falling short of the grades needed for the firm choice, he or she must take up that place.)
Once your child has decided on a provisional Firm Choice and a provisional Insurance Choice, you can check out those two courses in much more depth by visiting the two Departments.These are a bit like the Open Days you may have been on before, but not exactly the same: on these, you should be able to go into more detail about the exact course your child has received an offer for. Different Universities call them different things: Departmental Visit Days, Subject Days, etc. Here at Aberystwyth, we just call them Visiting Days. Click here to find the dates of our Visiting Days. Click on the link below to find out about Visiting Days in general and to carry on through the Application Maze.
Once you've found out everything you can, and your child has made his or her choices, you will know what the A level targets are and you will be supporting your child through the stressful period of revision and examinations. Again, there is a balance to be struck between being motivated to get the grades to go to the place he or she really wants to and being open to the possiblity that it might not happen, and that other Universities on the list have much to offer.
The issues will become clearer on Results Day.
Financial Incentives
Universities offer a range of financial incentives to encourage your child to choose them as firm choice. At Aberystwyth, for example, there is a £400 Accommodation Bursary for students who put us as their firm choice by 30th June; there are other incentives for students who get very good A levels; and so on.
These will be waters which your child is less used to navigating than you: you need to check the terms and conditions of these incentives carefully.
All Universities do this, but it is not just us who say that Aberystwyth’s range of Scholarships and Bursaries is the best in the UK. You should also check out the financial incentives which all your preferred Universities are offering: