Hello and welcome to this short introduction to International universities my name is David Hawkins I am a director and the founder of the University guys we are independent Educational Consultants specializing and helping students apply to universities all over the world the focus of this talk is going to be based on how
International universities differ from those you find in the United Kingdom now lots of students from UK schools are now applying to International universities this is an overview of where the students that we worked with in the class of 2023 gained offers students from the UK going to countries around
The world and international students wanting to come here so it’s an increasingly popular thing that students are choosing to do however what we’ve got to understand is that International universities will not work on the same basis as those in the UK they are different depending on the country and
The system you’re applying to we have to understand that it’s not like picking up a British University and putting it down in a different country there are different ways in which a university experience is delivered for example the process by which students will build their University short list will
Necessarily need to work differently what you will study will likely be a little bit different or very different how you assess the quality of a university will potentially be very different and then finally how you go about making your app ations will be different so let’s delve into these how
You think about choosing a university now in the UK we have two bits of information that allow us pretty quickly to narrow down our University short list the first bit is your predicted grades the grades in a levels IB B Tech Etc that you’re predicted to get when you
Finish school the second bit is the course you want to study whether that’s business or mechanical engineering or or French now those two bits come together and there all sorts of wonderful tools and websites out there to allow you to build your short list the problem is
That’s only really the way it works in the UK you can’t go onto websites of universities in other parts of the world and necessarily find a level or IB or B Tech entry requirements in the same way as we do on ukc.com nor really can you find what course you’re applying for at
Universities where their curriculum doesn’t work that way so you’re going to have to think about this in a very different way and if I’m being honest you’re going to have to invest much more time in this process of building a short list and I’ll use the United States as
The first example of that when we go to university in the United States in most cases you’re not actually applying for a subject I’ve got NYU Dartmouth College and the University of Michigan here and those are universities which offer very different experiences your academics going to be broad you won’t be applying
Them to just study a medieval language or to just study history or to just study maths you will get a much broader curriculum but as well as that you’re getting the culture of that University being a student in downtown Manhattan is a very different experience from in
Rural New Hampshire or in this big public Flagship University like the University of Michigan that Stadium there is absolutely vast and so you’re going to have to think about different things not just what course do I want to study but what is this full experience I
Want to be part of this is what a US University is going to select you for so you’ve got to understand it when you’re choosing your options and there are other things that come into this as well here in the UK most of our universities are comprehensive that means they teach a
Wide range of subjects you can go to places like doam or UCL or Edinburgh and there’ll be engineers and artists there’ll be historians and mathematicians there’ll be literature students and chemists and so that experience is very undergraduate Focus loads of students coming straight out of high school with a social life an
Accommodation that’s designed for them here in the UK our specialized universities typically are only art drama music schools but the rest of the world has lots of specialized institutions for example the photo here of Caltech and there are loads of places around the world that will only teach a
Narrow subject area they might only teach business or only teach Automotive Engineering or only teach car mechanics or only teach sport now those may be institutions where the focus of their education like CCH is much more on postgraduates people who already done one degree than doing their master’s
Degree their PHD or indeed their own research and that’s going to change what the social life and the accommodation will feel like the joke from students in cowtech is that being an undergraduate at CCH is similar to being a wart on a rhinoceros you exist but nobody’s paying
You much attention just get a sense of how the culture of a university will be different in this we’ve also got to understand that not every country’s universities are actually delivering a residential experience and some of this data here from a higher education policy Institute report from few years back
Shows this that actually in the UK we have a very high Watermark of students going away from home to university but in other parts of the world that is not the case particularly in Continental Europe where the public universities there very often don’t even provide any dorms or Halls of residents they believe
Their job is to deliver teaching and assessment but the rest of it is for you to figure out on your own so you might have to make an active choice to want to go to somewhere like hpo University here in North Carolina where I’m actually going to get that residential University
Experience rather than just assuming it comes everywhere and then in this short listing the university process you’re going to have to also have the big conversation about money if you are relying on your UK student loan to fund your studies then unfortunately that’s not portable outside the UK so what will
You be relying on well you might have a passport or residency that allows you to fund University in another country so for example if you have a French passport you can use it to study cheaply at universities in Quebec in Canada such as Bishop’s University you see here
Which teaches in English or you might have an EU passport that brings the cost of some EU public universities much lower now if you don’t have that and you’re also not able to pay the full international fees in certain places then you might need to rely on money
From universities that could be need based Aid where a university looks at your family’s Financial circumstances and decides how much they believe is fair to charge you that for example is what the ivy league universities do or it might be a merit scholarship money that you get for being really good in
The eyes of that specific University now this is a really important thing to get right before you delve into your International University process I encourage you to have this conversation with whoever it is who funds your life right now now the second thing that’s going to be different is how your
Studies will work and again it’s not going to be the same across the world we see a range of different curriculum structures where different universities in different countries will have a different academic process there are lots of places like the UK which offer a single or joint honors degree where you
Go to university to just study that one or those two closely related subjects but that’s not the same everywhere and you can see particularly when we look at the United States with a system that’s called the liberal arts and sciences whereby you are doing a range of different things when you’ve got
Students who are doing a more broad academic profile for example your major is not normally something that you have picked until your second year and it’s probably only making a third of your course over four years on top of the major you might have a Capstone like a
Thesis you also can have electives and those could potentially come together into a minor which would be another third of what you would study but the bits important to understand in the US Liberal Arts and Sciences is that you’re also going to have this core or general education where the university is going
To force you to study a range of subjects and that typically means you’re going to still be doing maths Sciences foreign languages literature the humanities the social sciences the Arts and even PE and that’s something that’s very different what we used to in the UK you going to MIT you’ll still be doing
PE the Arts Humanities foreign language so you’ve got to really understand it’s a very different academic experience and within the United States it’s going to be different between different universities what you would do at MIT is not the same as you would study in Brown’s open curriculum it’s not the
Same as you would study in Colombia’s very traditional fixed curriculum nor in places like the engineering school at Cornell more Specialized or the business school at upen more specialized and so you’ve got to really D into the Nuance many students applying from the UK to
The US miss this and end up applying to place with completely different curriculums and almost self-sabotage their applications because they’re really trying to make themselves be considered but almost opposite academic experiences so your studies will be very different we had that halfway house between the single honors and the
Liberal arts and sciences that we find in places like Canada Hong Kong Australia where you’re applying into a faculty or a program so rather than having to study everything you might just be studying all the Arts and Humanities or all the Commerce or all the engineering or all the Sciences so
You can have a greater breath but around the theme of what you want to study and you’re not necessarily being forced into studying things outside of where your focus is we’re increasingly also seeing interdisciplinary degrees where we’ve got a theme or a question on which other elements are hung for example things
Like climate change which involves environmental science but also the law politics economics will need to all come into it or development studies understanding how to help countries lift their people out of poverty again that’s going to bring in lots of different subjects so universities that are
Teaching in these kind of ways and if we head out to all the other different parts of the world we’ll find the educational cultures of those countries for example here Hong Kong University of scien and Technology will respond to the cultures at that that place we also have situations where actually the
Universities will be teaching you in different ways depending on where they physically are as you move around the world the world B and business for example is a program where students will go to three different continents over the course of a 4-year Business Degree we have options where you would split
Your time between two universities in two countries like Trinity College Dublin in Ireland and Columbia in New York C Po in France and University California Bel Cy so loads of different options there as well I also mention at this point if you are looking to the southern hemisphere Australia and New
Zealand that their Academic Year is flipped so if you were looking to study in those places bear in mind you likely going to have to have a little mini Gap year because their Academic Year will start in the February after you finish your school leaving exams so loads of
Different Pathways out there loads of different things out there for students the third of my four points is quality how do we assess whether the university is good well we’ve got to understand relative scale if we’re looking at somewhere like America with 4.3 million students graduating from high schools each year it’s not
Surprising that for the 2000 or so offers Harvard was looking to make into 2022 entry 8,000 Americans applied for them having not dropped a mark with in high school that’s like having straight Nines in year 10 straight Nines in year 11 straight A stars in Year 12 straight
A stars in Year 13 it’s a pretty high bar but it’s a much bigger place and therefore compared to places like Oxford and Cambridge you’re going to find very few students able to get into the top American universities because the competition is so much higher but if we
Flip that round and look to somewhere much smaller like the Republic of Ireland you’ll find many fewer universities and therefore the competition doesn’t necessarily work in the same way so where is good has to be assessed by actually what is the competition with in each country for places at that University if we’re
Looking at Continental Europe we also have to understand that selection is not really a thing at all these universities for example KU lervin that you see here will typically determine students admissibility based on eligibility do you meet our minimum qualifications to get in if you do you can start and we
Won’t select you into year one but we will select you from year one into year two selection after the gate this University would deny a student for business if they had three a stars but one of them wasn’t maths and they would admit a student for business with three
C’s if they did have maths it’s about being eligible not necessarily having the highest grades then if we come back to those specialist universities what you’ll find is your aptitude for that specialism it’s what gets you in you wouldn’t expect a music school in the UK
To not audition the student well then if it’s a specialized University in other part of the world they will want to audition you for the specialism this University here is the AOL hotelo Doan in Switzerland it’s one of the world’s best hotel management universities so their selection procedure involves a
Team building activity because that’s the sort of thing you have to have an aptitude for in their area of specialism so very different ways it works and then the last part of the process is then how you will go about the application these are not replacing your five on ucast and
They’re not on ucast but they are going to involve different application systems there will be some places which are all on one system other countries where different universities will be on different systems and many universities will also expect you to apply to the universities directly so you’re going to
Have to understand that everything is different the early you get out there and figure out the deadlines some may be earlier than the UK some may be later you’ll understand that every process will work differently you’ll have to do different things provides different information as indeed will your school
Particularly in that you’re going to find the writing is different you will be unlikely to be sending your ucast statements to all the universities you’re applying to there’ll be different types of essays you might have to send a CV you might have individual questions for each University there is no Standard
Process now that was a very quick overview but hopefully it’s given you some themes to start delving into if you would like to know a little bit more please visit our website the universityg guu.vn