Photo Credit: Maddie Norwood[/caption]Union Jacks. Tea. The Tube. Bad teeth. Doctor Who. Phone boxes. These quintessentially British things are what first attracted me to England in 2013, when I traveled there with theatre students and teachers from OHS and C.W. Stanford Middle School. My experience was incredible, and I can still vividly remember the sights I saw. What attracted me most was the culture. The British are sophisticated and refined, with a history that dates back more than a millenium. While America hasn’t even been a country for 250 years, England was founded in 927 AD. Numerous philosophers, thinkers, and artists have lived and died there, so where better to study for my undergraduate education?
My parents, friends, and teachers all have the same reaction at this point. Study? In England? For college? They laugh, mistakenly thinking I’m joking. Immediately, their main concern is tuition rates. However, applying to five colleges only costs $37 and the actual cost of college is slightly less than the tuition for my top U.S. college, New York University. Plane tickets are a concern, but video calling and social networking has made it easy to talk to family without actually coming home.
Financial issues aside, the benefits of a British education are undeniable. I applied to majors relating to political science. Studying this topic in a foreign country would provide me with a unique perspective that my classmates back in the U.S. would not have. The political system of the U.K is vastly different than the American system, so I would gain a ton of knowledge about politics that I couldn’t get in the U.S.
I applied to the University of St. Andrews, the University of Surrey, King’s College London, the University of Manchester, and Oxford University. Oxford, one of the highest-ranking schools in the world, is the one I wanted to go to the most. Even if I end up not being able to afford it, just saying I got into Oxford will be worth it.
As one would expect, applying to Oxford is much more difficult than applying to the other colleges. While the actual application is the same, because the UK uses a system similar to the Common Application, I have to be interviewed, take tests, and send in written work. Oxford requires U.S. applicants to score a 5 on three AP exams. I only have one 5 so far, meaning the most I can hope for is a conditional offer.
The two types of offers one can get from a U.K. college are conditional and unconditional. The former means that the applicant must meet certain criteria to be accepted into the college. The latter, rarer than the first, is unconditional acceptance--the applicant is accepted without meeting any more criteria. In a way, this is similar to U.S. colleges having the right to revoke their offers.
UCAS, or the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, is a surprisingly easy system to use. Like in the Common Application, users just enter their basic information, test scores, et cetera. Unlike in the U.S. system, there’s only one essay that applicants have to write, no matter how many colleges they’re applying to.This was one of my favorite parts about applying to the U.K.
Whether I can convince my parents to let me go to the schools I applied to is uncertain, but, even if I can’t attend them, I’ll be satisfied just having been accepted to a few.
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