SGTU: Choosing a University

This is, for many people, an extremely stressful process. There are over 200 universities and degree or higher qualification-dishing-out establishments in the UK, and they all, according to their prospectuses, are sunny, green places, where students loll lazily beneath the spreading branches of ancient trees and idly read textbooks in the sunshine.

Unless you ended up doing your A-levels by mistake and missed your vocation of sitting behind the helpdesk at your local tourist information centre, you’ll probably have figured out that this isn’t the case. A picture may paint a thousand words, but all the words from prospectus photographs are lies.

Many students looking at the newer prospectuses for their own university don’t recognise where the photo is taken, what it is, or even if it is anything to do with their university in any way, shape or form, often turning photos upside-down or squinting to try and find something they recognise.

Students in pictures doing things like pointing into the middle distance in the style of cheesy male fashion models, or reading a book between two of them, or laughing, gazing into the eyes of a gorgeous student of the opposite sex...they’re selected. The photos are posed. A favourite pastime of students in their second or third year is scouting through the new prospectus to see who gets their photo in there the most, who looks the best, or who was unfortunate enough to be photographed picking their nose in the background. By all means look at the photos, and look very carefully at them, but don’t get your major impressions from them.

To be frank, photos are so carefully chosen to present the best impression that using the reading-lazily-under-a-tree photo to influence your university selection is comparable to using a pet hamster in a plastic ball rolling around a ouijja board (TM) to spell out the name of your university.

Don’t do it.

The hamster has no idea you’re hoping for clubs, pubs, all-round fun and a reasonable qualification at the end of it, and you’ll end up at a university somewhere in Scandinavia with a name like Skndjplpol.

So unless you’re fluent in Norwegian, or on the other hand, if you don’t have a hamster, then hashing all the information you’ve got together and choosing on your gut instinct is best.

Oh, and the course you want, too. That’s important. Do nothing until you’ve read ‘Choosing a course’. Do it now. Yes even if you’ve read it once already, stop reading this and do it NOW.

If you’re still reading this, you’re intelligent enough not to do everything you read.

Well done.

If there’s somebody else in your vicinity reading this Guide who looks a little tired and skinny, keeps flicking backwards and forwards between two entries on this site and hasn’t moved for a long, long time, then do me a favour and go and tell them that it was a joke. Admittedly not very funny, but I do have to keep you intellectual types interested, even at the expense of my own sanity. If you could go and nudge them a bit, it would help me hugely - this site is liable to be more popular if it doesn’t have an accompanying fatality rate.
Thanks.

The Point Of This Bit

Sorry, yes. It’s purely to point out that at this point in your life, a lot of people will be telling you things. A lot of universities will be selling themselves to you. That’s what they do. No matter how high their entrance grades, how much you’ve heard about needing a staggering array of extra-curricular activities, whether you think you need to have a family history of going to a particular university, any or none of which might be true, the universities want you.

They need you.

No matter how high or low the standard they set, they wouldn’t be in existence without you, and they need you to apply. They need to fill their courses, they need to have statistics for you and the next year’s intake to read and find impressive.

So it’s not surprising that they will do anything and stop at nothing to get people, students, bums on seats. The prospectuses are all part of that selling of themselves, and so, take everything you read with a pinch of salt, and get into the habit of questioning things that you read.

Example:
‘Nearby Gulliblewich (or other fictional town) is extremely handy for shopping and nightlife.’

Is it though? Is it just that if you nip onto the motorway it’s an ‘extremely handy’ forty minutes’ drive, or three hours’ bus journey in windy lanes bordered by giant carnivorous plants, permanently blocked by farmers moving sheep from one field to an identical field seven miles away in an irritatingly rural fashion? If it’s a university you’re seriously considering, you might like to check, you might not. You might have to live in Gulliblewich at some point. Who knows? Those carnivorous plants could be dangerous.

Another example:
‘Foolishtown has a thriving community spirit, shown through active nightlife, and the outreaching attitudes of the permanent residents.’

Possible Interpretation: All the permanent residents know each other, sometimes intimately, and the students are outsiders and hissed at in the street. No one who lives there permanently accidentally breaks into the house of another permanent resident in the dark.

You see? It’s spin, it’s propaganda; it’s a way of making even central Leeds sound like an appealing place to live.

Don’t get too cynical and decide that university isn’t worth it, go home, go back to bed and never go out again. You can go too far. Just be aware that the prospectus is a sales catalogue for you, the prospective buyer.
Okay?