If you sent off your UCAS application right at the start of this school year, you might have found that you’ve already received the odd response from your chosen universities. And within a few months, you’ll have certainly heard back from most or even all of them.

And each response from one of your five adds a little more impetus to your decision-making thought process. Back when you submitted all your UCAS bumf you only had to pick five universities that you liked; very soon, you’ll have to whittle that number down to a top choice and a backup, something that many people find more difficult to do than picking those initial five.

So what’s the best way to go about making this decision? While it’s tempting to not think about it until the last possible moment, the savvy student starts weighing up his options as soon as possible. You’re making a big decision and if you get it wrong you’ll either have to put up with a university or course you don’t really like for the next three to five years or alternatively have to waste a year by dropping out and then going through the whole horrid UCAS process once more.

So even if when you made your initial selection of five places you had a firm favourite in mind it can’t do any harm to have another review of your options to make absolutely sure you’re making the right choice.

Now, you may think that this will just be a question of trying to recall what you learnt about your five choices back when you were poring through dozens of prospectuses, university websites and guide books, but there’s really no reason why you can’t do some more thorough investigating to arm yourself with all the information you need to make your choice. Knowledge is power and all that.

So here are some suggestions to help you as you weigh up your options.

Go back to the guides

You may feel that you’ve already gleaned all the information you could from the prospectuses, student guides and other literature that you trawled through when you first started thinking about university. But back then things were different: you were so young, so nave, and, most importantly, had to process tons of information about tens of places all in one go. So now is the right time to go back and read up again–this time more carefully and thoroughly–on everything there is to read about your universities and the courses you applied to at them. It could well be that, reviewing everything again, a place that you only put down to make up the numbers in fact now really appeals to you. Our own university guides are–of course–a great place to start this review process.

Pay an impromptu visit to your choices

It could be that you didn’t have the chance to visit all five of the unis that you applied to. If this is the case, now is a great time to go and have a look at them. And don’t feel you need to wait for an open day, either; while open days are a good way to learn about the academic side of things and also get the official line on life at the uni, turning up and having a look around the campus on a normal uni day is a great way to get a real feel of the atmosphere at the place. Through this you can learn, for example, if the student union bar is buzzing with post-lectures banter over drinks on a Tuesday early evening (as the university’s own prospectus will no doubt have it), or whether in fact students just unsociably scuttle off home after lectures.

Snoop around on the web and social media

This is another way of learning about how your candidate universities really are, as opposed to how they like to present themselves to you in their shiny promotional literature. Get googling and looking around Facebook groups; it’s a great way to get a sense of whether students at the uni you’re looking into are having a good time there and what they think of their courses, whether the information you learn comes from them posting photos of their shenanigans or griping about workloads.

Make use of someone that knows someone (that knows someone)

If you’re in your final year of school or college, most of your friends will probably be in the same boat as you, and so won’t have any first-hand experiences of their own about university life. It’s certainly not beyond the realms of possibility, however, that they have older siblings who are at uni; and it could even be that they’re at one of your five choices. They can be a great source of information and will be able to give you the inside track on what it’s really like where they study. And if you’re currently in the middle of a gap year and have friends who are currently at university then you’re in a great position. Even if they’re not studying the same course as the one you’ve applied for, through paying them a weekend visit you can still get a much better idea of what being a student there would be like, and of course a couple of student nights out into the bargain!