INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION
Evidence of commitment Julie Gottlieb believes that the most important element of the application is a student’s ability to demonstrate their alignment with both the course and the institution. “It’s about fit,” she says. “I have found that the most successful personal statements show clearly why the student wants to do a particular course, at a particular university, and why that university should pick them. “Students need to demonstrate that
they have thought about that, and that they have done something to prove it. For example, if the student is passionate about history, universities are looking to see that he or she has gone beyond the curriculum, that they have attended talks organised externally, and that they have made an effort to read around the subject.” “Students need to demonstrate their
passion for a subject without saying the word ‘passion’,” laughs Daniel de Witt. But he makes a serious point: students must realise very early on that they need to show and not tell universities why they should be awarded a place on a course, based on solid evidence of a commitment to their subject.
The global appeal of a US college education However, in the US, the university application need not be quite so specific or rigid, Mr de Witt says. While students in the UK are required to have developed a subject specialism, often at A Level, higher-education institutions in the US understand that someone aged 17 or 18 has not necessarily decided what they want to do. “In US higher education, they focus their core curriculum
around the liberal arts approach,” he explains. “Even if a student has decided that they would like to study engineering, they will
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still be required to study a broad curriculum which will involve for example, a little bit of maths, philosophy, French and science. It is through the discovery of those classes that they start to find out for themselves their major area of interest. “So being undecided as a teenager in the US – applying
undeclared – does not pose the same problems as it can in the UK. It’s a different mindset in the US.” The global appeal of studying in the US is growing by the
day, and there are now more international students studying in US colleges than ever before – almost one million at the last count, according to US organisation the Institute of International Education. And with more than 4000 universities and colleges in the US, compared with just over 150 in the UK, there is an enormous variety of institutions and courses to choose from. Paired with the ability to study a broad
curriculum for the first two years and to defer the choice of a major area of study until much later than in the UK, studying stateside can be an enticing prospect for many prospective undergraduates. Studying as an overseas student in
the US has also been shown to enhance a student’s CV when it comes to applying for a job. According to a Council for Industry and Higher Education (CIHE) survey, one in three employers values international study experience when reviewing job applications, and 65 per cent of employers prefer applicants with overseas work experience.
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Differences between UK and US college application But, says Daniel de Witt, students need to make a very clear distinction between the different elements of applying to a UK and a US university. “There are very different sets of expectations in the US,” he says.
62 | Re:locate | Winter 2016/17
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