umist

Releasing the pressure

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Well, I rang UMIST, and have now been ‘released’. I’ll probably get confirmation from Bradford on Monday. I’ll also need to let the bank and the Student Loans Company know that I’ve changed university. Fun, eh?

Been to Driffield today – my mum buys her bread flour from the nearby Bell Mills Garden Centre and she was about to run out, so she dragged me over there and bought 12Kg of the stuff. But it does make really nice loaves of bread…

Anyway, we didn’t spend long in Driffield (it’s a typical northern market town so there isn’t all that much there), but we did have lunch at The Bell Hotel, which I can thoroughly recommend; the staff were very friendly, the food was made to order in front of you and you can choose what to have in your sandwiches (including what extras), and they served real ale to boot. It’s a 3 star hotel in the Best Western chain – if you’re in the area, consider staying there.

Me = Not going to Manchester

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The letter from UMIST came today – I definitely don’t have the place, due to my A-level grades. I’ll ring them up later today – they have offered me alternative courses, but in something completely different (Textiles). Erm… what? I applied to do Computer Science. All of the other degrees on my UCAS form were Computer Science (or related). Why do I want to study Textile technology? Talk about adding insult to injury…

So, I’m going to Bradford in 4 weeks. Okay, so Manchester is a nicer city, and the accommodation at UMIST was better. But Bradford isn’t bad, and at least I’ll have free internet access in my room (albeit on 56k dial-up). And it’s closer to home.

Last night, we went out for a meal as a kind-of ‘getting into university’ celebration. Okay, we only went to the local pub, but we had a nice meal nonetheless (and I was absolutely stuffed afterwards).

The waiting is over

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The waiting is over – I now know my A-level results. But to be honest they weren’t really worth waiting for – I didn’t do nearly as well as I had thought I had done.

The best result was a ‘C’ in Geography, but I only managed dismal ‘D’ grades in Maths and French (of which I achieved ‘A’ and ‘A*’ respectively at GCSE only two years ago), and a ‘D’ in Computing AS.

What was really annoying was the fact that I would have got a good ‘C’ in computing, if it weren’t for the coursework – that didn’t even make ‘E’ grade. And apparently, my coursework was one of the best in the group. Doesn’t give you much faith in the York College computing department, does it?

But every cloud has a silver lining – I was still able to get a place at Bradford University on the course I applied for. I’m still waiting for a response from UMIST, but I doubt I’ll get in – by my calculations I was at least 60 points short of the 300 they were asking for. There is the opportunity of internal clearing at UMIST, but I’m unsure whether I really want to do the other courses that are still on offer in the Computing area. One is based around electronics – not good because I’m more of a software junkie – and the other was Computing with Geography, which might be worth it considering I did well in Geography, but do I actually want to do it?

The reason why I’m still waiting for confirmation is down to the fact that the UCAS website appears to have gone down, probably due to the huge numbers of people trying to access it. Fortunately I got in early while it was still working, which is why I know that Bradford accepted me.

Still, I’d find it incredibly annoying if I was trying to find information about clearing, or to get my results, only to find that the server isn’t working.