CLEARING

As soon as you find out that you haven't got a place at university, you need to start the clearing process immediately. Universities do not want empty places; they do not wish to have empty seats in lecture theatres, or empty spaces on courses. They want them full, so they're going to be filling up their places as quickly as they can. They are not going to wait a week for you to decide that you want a place there and hold that place for you. They are going to be filling up quickly which is why you need to have a plan in place before results day. Now, one of the things you need to think about is whether the course you have applied for maybe has slightly too high requirements and maybe think about a somewhat different course or is there a slightly different course that has loads of space on it because it's a little bit weird?

For example, I did biochemistry with a year in industry, but maybe straight biochemistry would have had lower requirements, one of my friends did biochemistry with a year abroad, they all had different entry requirements.

Electrical engineering is quite hard to get onto but one of my friends did electrical engineering with psychology, not so very common course but there are loads and loads of places left on it because people didn't think to combing the two courses. This is something you really should consider when looking for clearing places because you might be able to still go to your dream university. And do a course that is 90% the course that you wanted to if you just have to add psychology or French or a year in industry onto the end of it.

Consider different locations and universities. You may or may not have time to visit them not because like I said, things happen very quickly.

Fortunately, YouTube is a fantastic thing for visiting places that you don't actually have time to go to but if you can find time to visit them, it is really important that you at least try because you're going to be spending a lot of your life there and it's important that you are happy there. Once you have had a look through the website, call up the university and talk to them. They're going to need your UCAS ID so that they can log onto the system and see your results and everything about you.

Get informal offers. Now, make sure the universities are very clear that these are just informal offers and you can get as many of these as you like but don't take too long about it because these places are not going to be availabe for too long.

Once you have made your decision, and are confident that you're happy with your choice, you can add it to the UCAS website. The university will take over there, and they will confirm it.

If they don't confirm it after a certain length of time, then you can add another one on, but you can only add one on at a time.