UNIQ summer school any experience of this

[Tree]

hi all my dd is going to the uniq summer school at oxford in july for a week of law experience, however since applying and getting in to what was obviously quite a competitive event she has decided she now wants to apply for economics and management at oxford possibly with a law conversion later. She is still planning to go but was wondering if there maybe some flexability to swap some lectures and attend some of the PPE sessions that they run, but she isn't sure that she wants to reveal this untill she is there in case this is obviously a no no and she looks bad. I wondered if anyone has any experience of their dc's going to this and whether there was any sense of flexability to move around lectures and sessions the only good thing is that they are both in the same faculty of social science i think anyway. Any input gratefully received.

[Y]

No idea about flexibility of uniq schools, but as a general rule, the more notice you give someone of something, the more likely they are to accommodate you. No-one expects a 17 (?) year old to have their future career plans carved in stone, and people change degree courses right up to (and beyond!) the moment they start.

[Tree]

whilst i would normally agree with you Y the documentation and website advice we have is very discouraging from any kind of change to the application or trying to change weeks etc and my dd (maybe wrongly) feel intimitated to request a change and then appear ungrateful/uncertain/undecisive, whilst i agree in principle that 17 yr olds should be able to change their minds ,alot of the advice she's seen re personal statements especially oxford/LSE (wheere she really wants to go) seem to expect evidence of commitment to a particular course of interest over a length of time which gives some support to her concerns.

[moved]

Hi Tree,

I have no experience and cannot help you apart from the fact that frankness and honesty are often appreciated and many 16 yr olds change their minds. This is pre application, so is there to help DC make up their minds.

I wondered if your DD goes to a grammar, as I thought that you could only get on to UNIQ if you went to a school where children didn't usually get into Oxford.

[Tree]

Hi moved , she's at a comp but i think any state school kids can apply and i think there are quite a few grammar school kids on the programme although i think they look at your school and your postcode and try to pick kids from poor achieving schools and poor areas, having said that her school regularly get 2 or 3 kids into oxford and so competes favourably with some of the local grammars.

We talked about it more this evening my DD's current view is that she is going to engage and try to get the best out of the week as she is still really interested in law as a final possibility anyway, she feels that alot of what you get out of it is the intellectual challenge the experience of college life the social interaction, seeing what tutorial based learning is like, doing some independent study etc even if she could swap to ppe it is only the e that would be relevant for her the pp part would be less so. She has to do the TSA rather the the LNAT for economics and management and courses for these are run separately so her plan now is to try to go the the TSA course rather than the lnat but otherwise engage in the law week, i suspect that in reality it would be difficult to switch unless she could find someone who wants to swap from PPE to law.

If anyone's dc is interested in applying for this for next year let me know as she put lots of effort into the application process and may be able to suggest some pointers.