Applying after A Levels

I was wondering whether many people apply after they have their A Level results. Since I would just like to get my exams out of the way, would it be viable to apply the September after I receive my grades. I am planning to have a gap-year (will be applying for the PwC Gap Year Scheme), so if I applied at the end of my A Levels, I would start the following October (if I was successful of course), by which time my work placement would have finished. Is this a viable route?

Reply 1

CamSPSer

In one word yes! There are a few of us here who have post applied (some of us after being rejected the first time) and have been successful, others have not been.
the benefits of applying afterwards is that you have your grades and so your not a risk as such. you have also had a bit longer to mature and develop and get some other experience. however it is worth looking at colleges and courses and see what they say. some colleges are not so keen on gap years while others believe it is very good and even within a college there can be differences between different departments.
there are also problems with post applying in that there is less support from school (no practice interviews, possibly lack of access to reading material, difficuly in deciding what work to send in) you also have to make sure you are free for most of december and possibly some time in january if you are pooled. you might also be a bit less sharp on the subject if you havent had much formal learning in your year out.

what subject are you thinking about applying for and which college? the PwC programme is well thought of and so you obviously will be doing something impressive in your gap year.

i dont believe statistics are put out for post and pre applications but i wouldnt imagine there would be all that much difference (there are a lot of succesfful people on this forum but that is by no means representative of the fuller results)

Reply 2

JrW

Asking me what i want to do is a funny question (as im sure many TSR members will agree). It used to be law, but I decided that if I decided I wanted to go into law I could easily convert. For a long time it has been natural sciences, but I am starting to have my doubts, since science is definitely not what I want to go into. I am currently pondering over economics; it has always interested me, and the PwC Gap Year programme is quite well suited to an economics degree. So its between NatSci and Economics but either way I will be applying to Trinity (with a choral scholarship).

:smile:

Reply 3

CamSPSer

i know what you mean :smile:

ive moved from politics to history&politics to politics to PPE to Sociolgoy and Politics to Sociology back to Sociology and Politics. not quite as varied as you but still a swinging pendulum which has yet to stop
you can apply to both cambridge and oxford if you want a choral scholarship i believe. or is that only organ scholarships? or am i making that up completely. economics will probbly be more keen on a post application person than natsci but that is a generalisation. however you will be in a better position to apply for eco than natsci in terms of interview preperation as no doubt there will be people at PwC who have done economics at cam. though there are a good few scientists in that company so they may be able to give some help. might well be worth asking them what is on offer

Reply 4

JrW

Your not completely wrong, because you can apply to ox and cam if you are applying for an organ scholarship. Thanks for your advice. I think I will be a post applicant, and I think it will definitely be more positive if I apply for economics, because it is such a competetive subject anyway, there's a lot of luck involved if you are applying conditionally, so if you have you grades there's a greater element of finality and therefore you are either a nay or a yay I suppose. That's my opinion.

Reply 5

CamSPSer

jamierwilliams

yay, nay or pool then yay or nay unfortunately. apply for the subject you want to do, not one you think you have more chance with. by the time i applied last year i really wasnt that keen on my course but thought i had a better chance than with the one i wanted to do and i believe that probably showed up. if i had applied for PPE then i might have got in, but who knows. all i can say is that this year i enjoyed the preperation i did for my application and i think that really helped. if you find yourself loving hayek, friedman and stiglitz then economics is going to be for you. while if you cant find anything more exciting than whatever they do in natural sciences then do that. obvious advice but sometimes easy to ignore :smile:

Reply 6

JrW

I definitely don't want to do economics because its the easier option but I really like the look of the cambridge course, very mathematical.

Reply 7

CamSPSer

jamierwilliams

I definitely don't want to do economics because its the easier option but I really like the look of the cambridge course, very mathematical.

I have two words: Maths! Yuck!

Reply 8

phishfood

i had exactly the same dilemma over NatSci or Economics. came down on NatSci in the end, cos i think i would like to do postgrad research, and the kind of research economics that i found myself really interested in isn't as immediately useful in the real world

Reply 9

CamSPSer

can you do economics as part of natural science? i believe you can at durham and i suppose they modelled their cfouse pretty close to cambridge

Reply 10

phishfood

notyourpunk

can you do economics as part of natural science? i believe you can at durham and i suppose they modelled their cfouse pretty close to cambridge

you definitely can at durham, but not at cambridge (tho i expect no-one'd stop you from popping along to the odd lecture if you felt the need). don't tell anyone at durham they copied cambridge's course! at durham, most people do a kind of major/minor course where they start with their 'major' subject specialism and add 'minors' to study to less detail, whereas at cambridge you start unspecialised and narrow down until the final year when you do one subject

Reply 11

CamSPSer

phishfood

maybe i should go stir that up on the durham boards :aetsch:

Reply 12

JrW

I think i might apply after my A Levels just so that I can get exams out of the way without having to worry about Cambridge application. But on the other hand, if I were to apply after my A Levels, then interviews would collide with any gap year placement that I do. I think that because economics is so popular and it's a lot to do with luck, I may apply after A Levels, at least then you have your results and everythin is slightly more concrete.