UCAS announced a new record of almost 500,000 students starting university courses this academic year.
Many of us can readily recall our parents and friends recounting exciting, hilarious and inspiring anecdotes from university years, halcyon days looked back on with happiness.
But as the number of courses and universities in the UK rises, students are finding it increasingly difficult to decide what to study where. Many do what research they can but end up making arbitrary and ill-informed decisions nonetheless, through no fault of their own.
Figures released last year show that students are just not receiving the information they need to make the correct choices. A shocking 46% of students in the UK said they felt unprepared or didn’t know what to expect from university, whilst a further 7% admitted that they wanted to change their course altogether.
But rather than bewailing the statistics and pointing the finger, the time has come to address the situation.
An exciting new online resource called Unifo, launched by Bristol Mechanical Engineering student Hugo Bailey, has done just that. “Written by students, for students”, it covers 320 universities in the UK and provides specific reviews of over 100 courses. It’s an unbiased collection of crucial statistics and advice that current students wish they’d known and want to pass on. The wealth of information ranges from courses to campuses, finance to freshers’ week and Erasmus to entry procedures.
Bailey started Unifo single-handedly in 2009. A fresher in 2008, he found that his course differed greatly from what he’d expected and quickly discovered that many others had the same experience. He created Unifo to address the dilemma which has already become popular among students across the country.
“The trouble is that you can’t find bad press on any university in the UK”, he says, “and the information on university sites themselves is, understandably, biased.”
Through Unifo he aims to improve the experience of upcoming students, whilst gaining invaluable business experience himself.
His next step, he tells Epigram, is to develop the Unifo web-forum so that students can discuss questions and concerns directly. By September he aims to have doubled the number of reviews available, which as yet only cover undergraduate courses. “No one else does what we do”, he says, explaining that Unifo provides the “entire package”. Nothing, it would seem, could make things easier for students just starting out.
Susannah May, Epigram, March 2010