Your Child's UCAS Application
Making a UCAS Application
Making the actual UCAS application is probably the scariest moment – when your child puts pen to paper and commits to the place or places where he or she might spend at least the next three years of his or her life.
The factors that influence choice of University are very diverse; and they can often be impressionistic, at an age when your child may still be very impressionable. You are generally supposed to be somewhat less so, but it doesn't always follow. If you do get a chance to sit down together and talk things through in detail, it may help to have a piece of paper just to write down plus or minus points about each prospective choice. The nuts and bolts of how to do it are on the UCAS site, which becomes your bible for this part of the process. Your child should still also be getting help from school. But read on to get the general picture.
We try to avoid, in these pages, giving you any advice about how to be a parent; but ultimately the life choice your child is making at this point is no different from any other in terms of your relationship. Whether or not you agree with it, your child needs to know that you will give your best support to whatever decisions he or she makes.
Typically, your child chooses five courses. There will almost certainly be one or two which he or she really favours.
However, it’s very important at this stage to remember that all five choices are provisional: you don’t know what offers your child will get and there’s more for you to find out about the five courses. Neither you nor your child should get fixated on one choice. This can be quite handy, because the course your child favours may or may not be the one you would have chosen, and you may be glad of a little wriggle room. It’s important to remind yourself, though, that it is not you who’s going to take the course.
The application is accompanied by your child’s Personal Statement. Prospective students are not always sure about how important the Personal Statement is: indeed there has been recent media comment suggesting that Universities do not take it seriously. This is not the case at Aberystwyth: and probably not anywhere else. Often the Personal Statement will not be used by the University: but if it is used, then a bad one will scupper you. So click on the next link to read about the Personal Statement and to carry on through the Application Maze.