Comparing Unis in and around london

Gotta- I'm applying this fall to start courses next year...it's a little harder to find out about the application process and I have no idea what sort of chance I have at getting in at various places so I'm sort of picking a few where I like the programs and seeing what happens!!

Good luck with your applications .

In general, if you're a postgraduate student it is easier to get into a university than if you are an undergraduate - for example, Bristol is considered a difficult university to get into for undergraduate study (each year about 40,000 students apply for just over 3,000 available places) but I had no problem at all getting onto a masters course there (almost everyone who applied for my course was offered a place - there were 14 of us in total). I applied for three different masters programmes for the 2006/07 academic year - Bristol, Leeds and UCL - and was offered a place at all three universities.

Also, if you are an international postgraduate student, it's often even easier - because you will be bringing valuable money into the university via your international fees and most universities will probably be more than happy to let you in .

Ooh, I like that news! Finally, *something* positive!

You can get around most of London either on foot or by using the underground train services/overground buses. The majority of the universities that are in the city (LSE, Kings, Queen Mary, UCL, Brunel etc.) are right in Central London and so are very close to hundreds of shops, bars, pubs, restaurants, theatres etc. and you can travel around this area relatively easily.

Brunel is in uxbridge it's nowhere near London. I think it's in zone 5 or 6 so you're looking at about an hour to get into central London.

That being said there is a lot of "stuff" in Uxbridge but it's definitely not in central London.
Best way to work out if things are in central london is to go on the website, find the nearest tube stop from the "visiting us" page and then look up that tube stop on a tube map.

If it's in zone 1 it's in central(ish) London, if it's in zone 2, it's pretty close, anything outside of that and you're looking at a commute to get into town. But wherever you are in london even in the outer zones there will be pubs, shops and restaurants, most areas are not like the miles of suburbia you get in the Us with just houses and public transport is everywhere.

If you pick a random spot in london, say oxford street or the museums or something you know you want to visit, you can use tfl's journey planner to see how long it will take you to get there from the uni you choose.

I would also doubt you can get around London by foot, well at least I can't :/   Although parts of it are walkable, generally it's really rather large and you'll need to rely on the tube and buses.
It takes about half an hour to get from one end of zone 1 to the other ( I did it last night! ) on the tube depending on where you're going etc


 

How to define 'in London'?

-You could say all places on the tube network.
-You could say all places which are covered by a London Borough.
-Or you could say all places which have a London postcode, namely N, S, E, W, and combinations of the two. 

If you really want to be in the centre of things, then go by the postcode.  So, Brunel is in Uxbridge (yuck) and has a 'U' postcode, therefore  not London (and I did politics there, and wouldn't necessarily recommend it)

Looking through the list of UCL colleges, Kings, LSE, SOAS, SSEES, are smack in the middle of London.  Royal Holloway is in Egham, as said, which is lovely but a bit of a pain transport wise, and quite insular (Brunel used to have a campus nearby but it closed down), Queen Mary is in Whitechapel, which is fairly central though more East London, which is quite trendy these days, and Goldsmith's is in New Cross, which is very East and REALLY trendy right now.

Others are University of Westminster, University of East London, but LSE and other UCL colleges are old and will be much better in terms of rep.

Vicky

Brunel is in uxbridge it's nowhere near London. I think it's in zone 5 or 6 so you're looking at about an hour to get into central London.

That being said there is a lot of "stuff" in Uxbridge but it's definitely not in central London.
Best way to work out if things are in central london is to go on the website, find the nearest tube stop from the "visiting us" page and then look up that tube stop on a tube map.

Okay, now I'm getting very confused - I've been doing Google searches and looking on maps and each time the universities I'm searching for seem to come up on the map as being right in Central London - so I keep finding different info after I've replied to the thread! I think I'm going through the same issues as the OP for finding the correct information  . One minute Royal Holloway is apparently in Central London, the next it comes up as being in Surrey... talk about getting confused .

I would also doubt you can get around London by foot, well at least I can't :/   Although parts of it are walkable, generally it's really rather large and you'll need to rely on the tube and buses.

When I was at the US Embassy for my student visa appointment in 2003, my dad had to kill some time - so he walked around Central London for 3 hours and covered a pretty large area of it   - personally I would have used the tube... but I bet he was trying to save money by not using it, lol.

Okay, now I'm getting very confused - I've been doing Google searches and looking on maps and each time the universities I'm searching for seem to come up on the map as being right in Central London - so I keep finding different info after I've replied to the thread! I think I'm going through the same issues as the OP for finding the correct information  . One minute Royal Holloway is apparently in Central London, the next it comes up as being in Surrey... talk about getting confused .

Is the map giving you 'Holloway' instead of 'Royal Holloway'?

Vicky

Different Campuses!

Royal Holloway has a campus in Gower Street (central london)   but it's main campus is here :

http://www.rhul.ac.uk/Shared/Maps/Regional-Map0709.pdf

Here are some campus directions to it's main campus:
http://www.rhul.ac.uk/Visitors-Guide/directions.html

I think stop using google maps by googling the name. Find the campus addresses and do what Vicky says, use postcodes 

Good luck with your applications .

In general, if you're a postgraduate student it is easier to get into a university than if you are an undergraduate - for example, Bristol is considered a difficult university to get into for undergraduate study (each year about 40,000 students apply for just over 3,000 available places) but I had no problem at all getting onto a masters course there (almost everyone who applied for my course was offered a place - there were 14 of us in total). I applied for three different masters programmes for the 2006/07 academic year - Bristol, Leeds and UCL - and was offered a place at all three universities.

Also, if you are an international postgraduate student, it's often even easier - because you will be bringing valuable money into the university via your international fees and most universities will probably be more than happy to let you in .

How true is this for PhD programs specifically?

I'm not sure on PhD programmes, to be honest. A lot of people doing PhDs in the UK have research council funding of some kind - but I think you can only qualify for the funding if you are a UK/EU citizen/resident, so if US citizens wish to do a UK PhD, they will often need to either fund themselves or find funding from elsewhere.

Competition can be stiff for funded PhD places - my department at Bristol had over 100 PhD applicants, but just 6 funded places available last year! However, if you can find your own funding, it may be easier to get a place because it won't be costing the university/research councils anything.

It's really going to depend on the university you're considering and the opportunities they have available. My research area last year was pretty specialised and so there were only about 5 universities in the entire UK who had PhD projects on offer in my area.

If you're interested in doing a PhD over here, it might be worth doing a bit of research into what projects are available, where and with whom and then contacting the professors/departments you are looking at and finding out their policies/statistics for PhD applicants .

I anticipate using my own funds and US loans to pay for a PhD course!  I've identified very few sources of funding; the amounts are, not suprisingly, meagre. Anyway, my school would be earning money from me- does that improve my chances of admission?

Due to my interests, it would be best to stay where I am (SOAS), though I really dislike the way things are run here. I'm considering UCL (across the street) or LSE, a few bus stops away, as well. They seem more organized.

I just started a PhD programme in the UK as an American expat.  My tuition is 9000 pounds per year.  Regular Stafford loans are available up to $23,500, which covers tuition as well as some living money.  Cost of living where I am (Glasgow) is roughly 9000 pounds for a single student and 11,000 for married.  My wife will (eventually) be working a job to cover the difference.  If you could get additional funding to cover the cost of living, I highly recommend it as it makes life easier since jobs can be hard to come by.
Also, I think the best thing to do is to research each department you're interested to identify at least one person directly in line with your research aims, as well as at least another who is in a cognate area.  I started with a long list of 15 departments and narrowed it to a short-list of 6 by looking at the centres associated with the department as well as the areas faculty members were interested in (both as research fields and areas of supervision).  From there, I contacted my "favourite" of each department with a short pitch of what I wanted to study.  That list quickly narrowed to 4.  I then corresponded with each person for a while, eventually sending them a paper I wrote that was closely related to what I wanted to research.  Three of them then suggested I apply.  From there, I applied, and went through the more mundane application process, finally settling with one.  It is also worth noting that most universities don't start talking about funding (or housing!) until you've been accepted to a programme, so apply early.

Also, I think the best thing to do is to research each department you're interested to identify at least one person directly in line with your research aims, as well as at least another who is in a cognate area.

Honestly, a good-quality university won't accept you for a PhD if there isn't somebody working in the subject who is able to supervise your work. If they don't have somebody who can do it, they're just in it for the extra money. Unfortunately, there are some unis that are at that point and will do that, much to the disappointment of their faculty.

I applied to a couple programmes, but chose the one that interviewed me for an hour and included a supervisory committee suggestion with my offer letter.

As a PhD student, your supervisors do reflect on you. When I'm at a conference, I get asked where I study and who I study with.

Yeah, your supervisor is a big part of your PhD and finding a good one is important.

My best friend started a 4-year MSc/PhD degree in Computational Physics back in 2005 - but unfortunately her supervisor was absolutely rubbish... he was never actually at the university (always off at meetings/conferences around the world) and gave her very little help and advice. After 2.5 years she ended up having to give up the PhD, get just an MSc with it instead and then get a job in Nanotechnology - all because someone else from a different university was doing a similar research project and published their work first! It should have been my friend's supervisor's job to ensure that that didn't happen... and he didn't do that job properly, so 2.5 years of hard work went down the drain  .

On the reputation side, your supervisor can also be important, as jen252 mentioned - this year in the US, my supervisor mentioned this one guy who was considered the father of my subject area. She praised his writing style and his ability to explain concepts clearly in his papers and basically said he was a really important guy. So when I went to a conference in July and found out that one of the students there was working with him, I was very impressed !

I applied to a couple programmes, but chose the one that interviewed me for an hour and included a supervisory committee suggestion with my offer letter.

As a PhD student, your supervisors do reflect on you. When I'm at a conference, I get asked where I study and who I study with.

I made the mistake last year of deciding to apply for a PhD in the US, and going for one at the same university I'd studied at for a year as an undergraduate. Back then, one of my professors said that if I ever wanted to go back for grad school, to contact her, so I did. I got accepted and moved to the US in January 2008.

The problem was, I absolutely hated it when I got there - although I'd loved studying there before, it just wasn't the same second time around. I soon realised that the research group I was in wasn't doing exactly the same kind of research as I wanted to do and there was no one else at the university working in the area I wanted to work in. In terms of visa issues and chances of being accepted, it seemed that trying to transfer to a different US university would have been too complicated and so in the end, I decided to leave the US and move back home to the UK (in August 2008).

I realise now that I rushed into it - I applied to that university because I already had contacts there and knew I had a better chance of getting accepted than if I'd applied to Harvard or MIT or somewhere, but I didn't do enough research on exactly what sort of work my supervisor did, or what other opportunities there might be at other universities and so the whole thing was just a big disaster!

Right, in the UK it seems that the PhD supervisor(s) is so important that it can easily trump the school's rankings (this is the same in the US to some extent).  If you had a choice between going to, say, LSE and working with a few good people or going to some place that's much lower on the rankings but has a "famous" person in your field, I'd actually go for the latter over the former.  I'm in that position now and it's great because I've been introduced to a lot of leaders in my field of study because they're friends with (or even former students of) my supervisor.

My program is rather er... special- Anthropology of Food. The co-instructors of my core class are both anthropologists who specialize in food (among other things), and I have overlapping interests in 1) Japan and 2) globalization/transnationalism, so my current school, SOAS, is the perfect place. Unfortunately, its bureaucracy and organizational style aren't ideal.  In fact, I feel like like tearing out my hair every week!

Having access to other Univ of London schools is terrific, however. (I'm considering UCL and LSE for my PhD as well.)