Monthly Archives: November 2011

Gotta read ’em all

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So, I’m spending some time this afternoon going through my second pile of forms. Basically, our central admissions team receive your application and send a copy of the form over to me, usually in a bundle of somewhere between 40 and 60. When they drop into my pigeon hole in the politics building, I pick them up and then look to carve out a few hours to take a preliminary look at them. I aim to sort them into strong accepts, accepts, maybes, special cases and rejections: then I revisit categories 2-5 over time to make a final decision, and choose the best offer to make. I’m a little behind and I have two piles here – these are forms processed over the last couple of weeks. Ah well, back to it…

General Studies – what is it good for?

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In Politics here, we do accept General Studies: you can use it to fulfil whatever offer we give you (apart from a few very rare instances). Now, I know that not everywhere does this, so here’s a quick explanation of why we do:

First, my predecessor in this role (who ran a far better blog than I’m going to 🙂 ) ran the numbers: applicants who come here with general studies tend to do well, or especially well, on our degree programmes – interestingly, there’s a stronger correlation than for students who have done Politics at A-level.

Second, there are some plausible reasons for this. General studies tests relevant skills – your ability to write well, think critically, and analyse a question or problem. Plus, at least if general studies is similar to when I did it back in 1992(!), it also tests relevant knowledge: notably, background knowledge of world geography, history and current affairs will come in handy on our politics programmes.

Third, these are skills and knowledge that not every applicant gets a chance to demonstrate elsewhere. We know that not every school or college offers Politics, and that not everyone who chooses politics at University chooses it – or other humanities and social sciences – at A level (and so we don’t require it).

Welcome

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Welcome to my blog, which is something of an experiment.

The 2011/12 cycle is well underway, and I thought I’d start a blog to give applicants a bit of an insight into my side of the process. This is also a great place to give responses to some common questions that arise from applicants, and over time I’m hoping this will build into something like a list of frequently asked questions and responses. So, if you have anything specific to your application, send me an email at graham.long@ncl.ac.uk and I’ll answer you privately. But also contact me with larger, general queries about the admissions cycle, and I’ll aim to answer them here.