Attending open days is time consuming and expensive – so parents and children alike will want to come away with a clear idea of whether the universities they visit are going to be a good match.
“It’s a good idea to have somebody else with you on the day, whether it’s parents, a friend or a partner,” says Carole McCann, head of student recruitment at the University of Law. “The better they know you personally, the more insight they can provide as to whether they can see you living and studying at that university. They’re also a good grounding influence in case you get caught up in the excitement of the day and forget about some of the things you wanted to find out about.”
Preparation is key, so pre-book train tickets and accommodation and find out about the day’s agenda. “We provide a guide for the day that can be accessed beforehand, so a lot of our prospective students come with the day all planned out,” says Emily Oliver, a third-year early childhood studies student at the University of Derby, who presents at the university’s welcome talks. “Write any questions down beforehand – we’ll always point you in the right direction to get the best answer or support.”
Dipisha Patel, events coordinator at the University of Wolverhampton, advises students and parents to ask specific questions about potential courses, including how graduates fare: “As well as the all-important questions about the course content, it’s good to find out about employment rates and the sorts of careers graduates enter.”
The universities will all present their best side, so try to get a reality check by talking to current students. “Ask the student volunteers about their experiences of getting accommodation,” says Abbie Hettle, who graduated from the University of York in January 2018. “I remember the mad rush applying for my first halls of residence – they were hugely oversubscribed. I think having approachable students there is great, so you can ask all the dumb stuff, like where you do laundry, and does the kitchen get cleaned?”
Open days can feel hectic, so make sure you build in some time to just get a feel for both the campus and the city. “Enjoy the day,” says Mandy Pine, development manager at Nottingham Trent University. “Absorb the atmosphere. You will get a gut feeling about each place you visit that you won’t get from looking online or reading about it. That’s why it is so important to visit in person.”
It can be tough for parents to defer to their children’s opinions, but it’s essential, says Oliver. “Let your child make the calls, support them in their questions and act as more of a guide than a leader,” says Oliver. “Obviously, it’s important that parents get their own questions answered too, but it’s the prospective student who will be spending the next three-plus years at the university.”
‘I have friends whose children dropped out in their first years’
For Karen Packham, going to open days with her daughter, Kristen Shorey, wasn’t just an information-gathering exercise, but a chance to bond. “We didn’t know Newcastle or Liverpool, so we explored the cities in the evening,” she says. “When you have more than one child, you don’t often get the opportunity to spend time with just one!”
They certainly had plenty of opportunities: Shorey attended general open days at several universities, including Cardiff and Sussex, and specific offer-holder days at Newcastle and Liverpool, among others, normally with a parent accompanying her. She’s now at the University of Reading, in her first year of studying psychology.
Picking a university is tough, and both Packham and Shorey say open days were a great way to narrow down options. “While some of the places were in lovely locations, I realised the courses themselves weren’t for me, or alternatively I found I didn’t like the location,” says Shorey. “So I’d definitely recommend visiting the open days for a broader perspective. You can collect leaflets, to compare information with other universities later on, which saves you having to write everything down on the day. It’s also useful to speak to current students, to get personal opinions on the student life and atmosphere.”
Packham asked questions that drew on her experience. “I asked the open-ended questions, such as what it would feel like to live away in this particular town, or on that kind of campus. I have friends whose children dropped out in their first years, and often the reason was because they didn’t enjoy living in the combination of campus and town they’d ended up in.”
Shorey says she asked her parents to come for guidance and support while travelling around new cities she hadn’t been to before. “They supported me by offering advice on what I should be looking for – such as accommodation, student support, extracurricular and student life – as well as asking all the important questions I had forgotten to ask.”
Although, Packham says, her own parents didn’t get involved in any of her university open days, she thinks things are different now. “They’d never been to university and it just didn’t even occur to me to involve them! In an ideal world, I wish our children could do this stuff on their own like we used to. But the pressure of knowing they are going to have this massive loan makes the decision so much more important for them. I try to be a touch point for them – a person who is slightly removed from it and who might pick up on things they didn’t spot.”
