Look at some university websites and prospectuses
Date: around 20/09/2002
By looking at universities as well as courses I am narrowing down my options
There were two ways I went about looking for a university. The first was to find out what universities offer the subjects I was interested in and see what they are like. The second was to decide what universities I would like to go to and then see if the offer courses similar to the ones I am looking for. I used a combination of these methods to find some universities and courses which I thought might fit me.
Take the second method first. I looked for some universities which I thought might be good for me. As I generally get high grades I looked at some of the universities in the Russell group.
Starting from this list I decided I didn't really want to travel too far away (I live in Oxford by the way) so excluded Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham and Newcastle. In decided I might consider applying to one of the Oxbridge universities (Oxford and Cambridge) and decided that if I did I would go for Oxford so this excluded Cambridge from my list leaving 12 universities left to look at, shown in the table below.
Now onto the second method, fining courses I liked the look of at universities. The set of courses I was interested in was shown on the Decide what I want to study page. Using the UCAS search by course option I was able to see what universities offered the courses I was interested in.
Once I had a list of courses I was interested in a universities I felt were about the right level for me I was able to put the two groups together to create the table below. It shows the 12 universities I had lest to choose from in the Russell group showing the subjects which they offered which I was interested in. Some of the universities show extra information in brackets. This shows the results I would need to get in and also the number of places offered compared to the number of applicants last year - giving me an idea of how easy it would be to get in, much of this information was collected from prospectuses in my school library.
University of Birmingham | Economics (86/575 BB) Mathematical Economics & Statistics (10/75 BB) Money, Banking and Finance (45/325 BB) |
University of Bristol | Economics Economics and Accounting Economics and Econometrics Economics and Finance Economics and Management Economics and Mathematics (AAB) |
Cardiff University | Banking and Finance Economics |
University of Leeds | Economics (?/165 BBB, for all 3) Economics-Management Studies Economics-Mathematics |
University of Oxford | Economics and Management (75/500? AAA) |
University of Sheffield | Business Studies and Economics (?/160 BBB, for all 9) Economics Economics and Mathematics Economics and Statistics Economics with Econometrics Economics with mathematics and Statistics Economics with Mathematics and Statistics -(Economics) Economics with Mathematics and Statistics -(Mathematics) Economics with Mathematics and Statistics -(Statistics) |
University of Southampton | Economics (10/89 BBB, for all 4) Economics and Econometrics Economics and Finance Economics and Management Sciences Economics and Mathematics |
University of Warwick | Economics (AAB, for all 3) Mathematics and Economics Maths-Operational Research-Statistics-Economics |
Imperial College | Mathematics with Statistics for Finance (?/200 AAB) |
King's College London | |
London School of Economics | Economics (97/2190 ABB) Econometrics & Mathematical Economics (5/152 ABB) Mathematics and Economics (ABB 35/385) |
University College London | Economics (24/100 AAB, for both) Economics and Statistics |
Note that King's College doesn't offer a financial/economics course at all so that's one down. The rest of the universities all offer the kinds of courses I would be looking for.