University Clearing
- climb aboard the rollercoaster, the A-level results are here again
Well, it begins, the 13 day week from hell. I’m already knackered and it’s only Monday. Frantic preparations are continuing to get everything ready for the chaos that will begin on Thursday - A-level results day. Obviously clearing is pretty horrible for the students concerned - not knowing which university they are going to, if any. But I guarantee, it’s a hell of a lot worse for the university staff involved in trying to recruit them. Stomach churning is a fair description. There’s all the pressure from the top to get the best students, and if that fails, simply as many students as possible. There’s the long hours, the mail merging, printing, stuffing and deperately trying to make the last post with your offer letters. There’s the record keeping and statistical analyses. There’s the frantically trying to track down an academic tutor to make an offer on an out of the ordinary application. There’s the hoping like hell that the advertising campaign you’ve approved will do the trick. But, most of all there’s the highly stressed applicant and, more often than not, their highly stressed parent to deal with. It is all worth it though, when you can offer that depressed and tearful voice on the end of the phone a place on the course they want, and listen as their despair turns to joy and their misery to whoops of joy - and they do whoop and scream and celebrate. That’s a pretty damn good feeling. Clearing is definitely education’s answer to Alton Towers and I get to go for two weeks every summer. And I don’t have to queue.