Every time 15th January rolls round it can mean only one thing: the deadline for UCAS applications. After the fun of New Year is over, many people await this big day with dread. Perhaps you circled it on your calendar months ago, full of good intentions to get your application in a good long while before then. But you kept putting it off and, before you knew it, you found yourself with just a couple of days left.
Or maybe, faced with so many options to choose from, you never managed to settle on a choice of five universities and courses. Or perhaps you’ve left the decision of whether or not to apply to uni until the very last minute.
Really the question of why you’re now trying to sort out your application with just a day or so to go isn’t really important. What matters is just getting it done on time and to the best possible standard. Faced with the pressure of the imminent deadline, many people give up at this stage, putting off applying to university for next year.
If you’re in this situation, we’ve got some pretty simple advice for you: don’t give up, and don’t panic! If you put your mind to it, it is in fact possible to complete a UCAS application, from start to finish, in fewer than twenty-four hours.
So take a deep breath and follow this step-by-step guide:
Step one:
Choose a University and a Course
Okay, so this might at first seem like singularly unhelpful advice. You may be screaming “It’s thinking of what course to apply for and where to do it that got me into this mess!” right now. Fair enough. But our advice has a little twist: if you can’t decide what to do or where to go, hedge your bets. If you’re torn between a couple of different courses, apply for both of them. And if you don’t know whether a rural campus or a big-city uni is right for you, apply for a couple of each. At this stage, all you need is a selection of five choices, not a final decision.
Another good tip if you’re unsure which course to apply for is to apply to universities that offer modular degrees. More often than not these universities will allow you to take courses in a subject outside of your degree title for the first year, and then if you like that subject more you can switch to it for the rest of your degree. So a modular university means more flexibility and less pressure to make a final decision right now.
Step two:
Again, this on the face of it is a very obvious piece of advice, especially if the reason for your current predicament is that you’ve been suffering from writer’s block for a good few months now. But just as there’s a way of cutting through the uncertainty of what course to apply for, so too is there a strategy for getting out of the personal statement quagmire.
And it’s this: keep it simple. Personal statement writer’s block comes from being overwhelmed by knowing what you want to talk about and how you’ll organise those thoughts into paragraphs. If this was September you’d still have several months to get something on paper and then re-sculpt and fine tune it. But it’s January now, and time is short.
So here’s what you’re going to do. Open a Word document. Then create the following headings in this order: Motivation for my chosen subject(s); current/past studies; work experience; extracurricular activities. Then write about 1000 characters (including spaces) on each. Once you’re done, proofread it (and also ask someone else to proofread it for you), , delete the headings you wrote (but not the text that goes with them!), make sure the whole document is under 4,000 characters in total, and voil, you have a personal statement. It won’t be the most sophisticated statement in terms of structure, and you probably won’t have had time to pepper it with quotes from Shakespeare, Marx or Darwin, but it’ll still be more coherent and to the point than the majority of statements that admissions tutors read.
Of course, if you feel confident that you have time to do a little bit more prep work on your statement, then do head over to our helpful personal statement section for some inspiration.
Step three: sort out your reference
Now this is a less obvious step, and one that the last-minute applier often overlooks. When UCAS say their deadline is 15th January, they mean the deadline for everything, including your reference. For many people, this means you’re going to have to convince someone in an appropriate position (a teacher or, if you’re a mature student a former employer) to write a reference for you in a very short space of time.
Thanks to the internet, getting the reference form to them and them getting their reference to UCAS quickly isn’t the issue; it’s all done instantaneously by email and on the UCAS website. So the challenge now is one of motivating your referee to pull their finger out and get the reference written ASAP. To do this, you should draw on those excellent interpersonal and communication skills you’ve probably talked about in your personal statement. Start by using the word ‘please’ a lot. Only consider bribes as a last resort.
In fact, it shouldn’t be as tough to get a reference as you think. Both teachers and employers have plenty of experience of giving them, and if they know you well enough and like you they should be able to put something together in time for you, so long as you stress how urgent it is and how much going to university means to you and how they’ll be your hero forever if they just do this one thing for you.
How the process of getting the reference works depends on whether you’re currently at school or not. If you are, your application should be sent on automatically to your teachers through the UCAS system. But even so, you should definitely contact your teachers yourself to ask them to get a move on.
If you’ve left school but want a reference from a former teacher, contact your school and they’ll give you a ‘Buzzword’ code that you put into the UCAS site, which will then route your application to them. Again, personal contact with the teacher outside of the system is essential if you want to make sure they do everything by the deadline.
And if it’s been years since you’ve been anywhere near a classroom, you’ll need to get an employer to do your reference. If this applies to you, what will happen is you put in the referee’s contact details and a link will be sent to them by email that will take them to the online UCAS system, where they can copy and paste in a reference for you. Just don’t forget to call your referee beforehand to explain everything so they can get the reference sent as soon as possible!
And that’s it! Follow these three simple steps and you’ll get your application in on time and be heading off to uni in September. Good luck!