The Official Glasgow Applicants 2012 Thread!

Glasgow hardly look at personal statements for their science courses, I'm applying for anatomy, neuroscience and Economics with a dentistry personal statement!

Now I'm sure I got an offer from them !
Cuz I received an email telling me they had decided to make me an offer etc...

But I still haven't got my welcome letter from UCAS so I can't access to Track Can't wait to find out what my offer is, I really hope it's something achievable ! Politics, literature, here I come ! Erm, hopefully

That aside, I have a question. Surely you all know how it works except me and I'm a complete moron, but how do the unis know how many offers to make ? I mean, they make more offers than they have places, meaning they except us to fail ? :/ And if everyone met their offer not all of us could enter the course due to lack of place right ? How does it work anyway ?

Also if someone knew how lenient they are with people failing to meet their offers ? (Don't know what mine is but already expecting to fail lol)

Sorry for all these questions :P

That aside, I have a question. Surely you all know how it works except me and I'm a complete moron, but how do the unis know how many offers to make ? I mean, they make more offers than they have places, meaning they except us to fail ? :/ And if everyone met their offer not all of us could enter the course due to lack of place right ? How does it work anyway ?

To Glasgow offer holders: Did you get an acknowledgment from Glasgow then an offer, or just an offer?

I got an acknowledgement first

And one more question, how long after the acknowledgment did you get your offer?

I'm afraid I deleted the acknowledgement so I'm not sure when I got it. But I got the offer a week after I sent off UCAS so it can't have been very long. Sorry.

No need to be sorry Just wondering how quickly people have gotten an offer after getting an acknowledgment - but I know it will vary from person to person.

Congrats on your offer by the way!

I think you've already congratulated me! I should imagine it varies between departments as well, and if you're applying for a joint honours it might take longer too. I take it you're a Scot? How comes you did GCSEs and A-levels?

To be entirely honest, I'm not too sure how the UK universities work on this, but I would imagine it's the same way the American universities do...

In the States, most kids apply through the Common Application (something similar to UCAS but a lot more tedious) which allows them to send unlimited number of applications. Of course, unlike the UCAS, there are a lot of supplementary documents and essays that need to be submitted for individual schools, so most of the top tier kids generally apply to around 5 different universities (a very rough estimate... depends a lot on individual high schools).

Point being, schools receive thousands of applications. From these, they have to select enough such that there are enough people enrolling into their schools. They achieve this by creating a buffer zone; they accept much more than they can actually handle because they estimate a portion of the accepted won’t enrol into the University. The size of the buffer zone largely depends on the popularity of the individual university... For instance, assuming both universities want a class size of 100 students, Harvard might accept 110 because most kids who receive an offer would be willing to enrol. On the other hand, Universities like Cornell (it’s another great school, but the trend is that many apply there as backups) might have to accept 130 because many students who receive offers won’t enrol there. And others might accept 150 and so on.

For UK schools, I assume the buffer zones would be even greater because they need to estimate a portion of their offers won't meet their conditions.

You can access track without the welcome letter if you try signing in again to ucas, it'll display your id number, note that down and then go onto track, type in your id number, your usual ucas sign in name thing and your password

To Glasgow offer holders: Did you get an acknowledgment from Glasgow then an offer, or just an offer?