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My name's Matt Harrison, I work in the Marketing, Communications and Recruitment department
here at the University.
So it's my job, basically, to disseminate information about applying to Higher Education
to potential applicants and applicants. So I'm talking about things like personal statements
and interviews and that sort of stuff. And also obviously working on things like open
days as well.
My top tip for potential applicants is: prepare. I kind of go by this motto: that if you fail
to prepare you're prepared to fail. So make sure that you're prepared and you know, kind
of, your stuff basically.
So, this kinda sounds a little bit nerdy but you've got to eat, sleep and breathe your
subject. There's no point in applying for something like Economics if you don't read
the Economist or if you don't read the BBC News sections of the website and that sort
of stuff. So you've got to make sure you kind of know your stuff.
We've got some very good applicants' channels, so if you've applied and you haven't been
to the University, you can contact UoN applicants on Twitter. There's a Facebook channel as
well, so we have a social media team who sort of deal with enquiries there so you can actually
ask questions.
My name is James Jupe and what I do is work on the social media, so I work on Facebook
and Twitter for the University of Nottingham applicants.
We set up the applicants' page to, to really help with prospective students because the
process can be quite daunting at first and what we try and do is make it a lot easier.
It's not just about the University, it's also about the city of Nottingham. So we post all
the good places to go out, photos as well. So it's good for people who are interested
in coming and they don't know what Nottingham looks like, they don't know what the campus
looks like.
Top tips for an interviewee: make sure that you've prepared sort of beforehand in terms
of the content but also a lot of people kind of underestimate that you've got to prepare
kind of psychologically as well, and also relax on the day.
So once you get there on the day, make sure that you arrive in good time. It's not good
to be late for interviews; you don't want to be late. Make sure you know how you are
getting there, make sure you know where the room is, make sure you know who's interviewing
you as well.
A lot of people don't realise that you can either ring up Universities and ask what the
format will be, or you can even be quite cheeky and ask who might be interviewing you or what,
if it's Medicine for example, is it going to be a Medical School member of staff or
is it going to be a GP or a doctor? That's just as an example. People don't really realise
that you can do that.
There are other opportunities to actually visit, so if you miss an open day it's not
the end of the world. There's mini open days, there's one in April. We have large University
wide open days in June and September.
If you've applied then most subjects run UCAS visit days. What a UCAS visit day is, it's
a sample lecture, tends to be a, for you to get a flavour of the University, so they're
not interviews or anything like that.
It's a chance for you to come and have a look around and actually work out whether we are
the place that you actually want to come and study.